By Paul Eckert
BEIJING, March 10 (Reuters) - China's foreign trade minister signed a World Trade Organisation deal with Thailand on Friday and declared "it won't be long" before China completes its 14-year quest to join the WTO, state media said.
Foreign Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng also confirmed that his counterpart from the European Union, EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, would travel to Beijing later this month for WTO talks.
"I received a letter from Lamy yesterday, saying that he is pleased to accept my invitation to come here," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Shi as saying in Beijing.
"I hope that China and the EU will conclude bilateral negotiations soon," Shi said after signing a WTO pact with Thai Deputy Prime Minister Supachai Panitchpakdi.
Xinhua gave no details of the Sino-Thai agreement, which followed a Chinese deal on Wednesday with Colombia to leave just 11 WTO members yet to clinch bilateral agreements with Beijing to pave the way for its entry into the 135-member trade body.
The EU, the largest WTO mmber yet to sign a deal with China, would send a high-level delegation to Beijing in the week of March 27 to finalise a deal, Lamy's spokesman said in Brussels on Thursday.
"We are going there in the hope that we will be able to finalise a bilateral deal," Lamy spokesman Anthony Gooch said.
Lamy earlier told a conference of EU and Japanese journalists by videolink from Brussels that "I myself will be going to China in the coming weeks in order to try and push this forward."
FROM TECHNICAL TO POLITICAL
Lamy's readiness to visit China appeared to indicate some significant progress may have been made because officials had said he would not join the talks until negotiations were far enough advanced.
Last month, four days of intensive negotiations in Beijing between China and the EU ended with no agreement.
Lamy declined to spell out the stumbling blocks but said technical and tariff issues, including mobile telecommunications and life insurance, had to be resolved before the EU and China could concentrate on the non-technical aspects of the talks.
EU sources in Beijing said after the last talks China had refused to discuss key European concerns about telecommunications and insurance and that valuable time was wasted when the Chinese reopened issues EU negotiators had thought were already settled.
A key sticking point was a European demand for 51 percent foreign ownership rights in Chinese mobile telephone networks, which would go beyond the 49 percent the United States agreed to in its WTO deal with China in November.
A European business source in Beijing said last month the EU demand on telecoms ownnership appeared "almost designed to fail" given the well-known domestic Chinese opposition to the terms Beijing offered the Americans.
CURIOUS TIMING
In Washington, where the U.S.-China agreement faces a tough political battle in Congress, the hiatus in EU-China talks gave rise to a theory that Brussels was playing a stalling game, waiting for anti-China lawmakers to scupper the American deal before signing its own pact, well-placed U.S. sources said.
The theory held that EU businesses could benefit from such a development because Congressional rejection of the deal would not keep Beijing out of the WTO, only deny U.S. firms the market access pledged by China, the sources said.
If Congress failed to give China the permanent normal trade relations (NTR) status necessary to complete the China-U.S. WTO deal, the vote would be put off until next year, giving EU firms a lengthy head start over the Americans.
The EU announcement it would restart political talks without any sign that technical hurdles had been cleared came a day after President Bill Clinton sent legislation to Congress that would grant China permanent normal trade relations (NTR).
A Western diplomat in Beijing said the timing of Lamy's announcement was "puzzling" but the delay theory was "far-fetched" given the high cost of failure and the difficulty the EU has in coordinating strategy among its 15 members.
"It was more likely that the Chinese underestimated how tough the Europeans can be on trade issues," the diplomat said.
China has said it hopes to join the WTO in the first half of this year.:
