By ELAINE KURTENBACH Associated Press Writer
BEIJING (AP) - Legions of jobless farmers, backward factories bankrupted by foreign competition, Chinese products banished by Western brand names - for some in China, the prospect of joining the World Trade Organization conjures up nightmarish scenarios.
Others here have the opposite take. More open markets, they say, will bring greater wealth and help transform China into a more modern, competitive and possibly more democratic country.
China is expected to enter the WTO later this year. While U.S. lawmakers battle over whether to grant Beijing permanent normal trade status, easing its way into the world body, the Chinese are debating their nation's future under a global trade regime.
Dialogue over political and economic reforms is usually confined to China's cloistered academic and Communist Party elite. But it may surface more openly during the annual session of the National People's Congress, which begins Sunday.
The government has thrown itself behind WTO, but an increasingly outspoken group of nationalists are pushing for more open debate about the risks of globalization.
"I want to speak out on behalf of the farmers. No one else will. After we join WTO, what will happen to them? Once cheaper foreign products flood in, many jobs will be lost," said Wang Xiaodong, former editor of the conservative magazine "Strategy and Management" and a leading voice in the nascent nationalist movement.
"I'm not opposed to entering WTO, but I believe we have to consider many problems," Wang said.
China's farmers account for 70 percent of its 1.26 billion people. They remain much poorer than their urban cousins and are among the most vulnerable to foreign competition.
Increased trade and investment resulting from WTO membership would create about 12 million jobs, but about as many will be lost in farming, the auto industry and other weak sectors, according to Chinese estimates. Those who lose jobs would join tens of millions already out of work because of layoffs at inefficient state-run factories.
In the near term, few economists or other experts say they expect the impact of WTO membership to be catastrophic. Most market-opening measures - including those allowing greater foreign competition in insurance, banking and telecommunications - will take effect gradually over five years or more.
Bracing for change, the government has stepped up a long-term program to funnel more domestic and foreign investment into the country's vast Western region. It hopes to bridge the widening divide between the landlocked, impoverished hinterland and the rapidly growing, more prosperous east.
Despite its eagerness to finally gain admittance to the body that makes world trade rules, the Chinese echo other countries in accusing the United States and other affluent countries of using global trade to their own advantage.
"Control of globalization is in the hands of the West, in the hands of the United States," said Wang, citing U.S. controls on exports of sensitive technology. "I believe this could threaten our national security and productivity."
Still, many Chinese intellectuals welcome the possibility that WTO membership might bring enough pressure for change to override domestic resistance to needed economic and political reforms.:
