Agence France Presse / Patrick Baert
BEIJING, March 29 (AFP) - The European Union said Wednesday trade talks with China were going slowly and that substantial progess was still needed for an agreement towards securing Beijing's WTO membership.
EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy and Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji laid out the two sides' negotiating positions on a market opening deal in an hour-long morning meeting, EU spokesman Anthony Gooch told AFP.
Lamy's 20-strong team then held a new round of discussions on specific trade issues with their counterparts at the ministry of foreign trade and economic cooperation (MOFTEC) in the afternoon.
Gooch said the EU team had come to China with the objective of sealing a bilateral market opening deal and had set no deadline to return.
But he also said the discussions so far were going slowly and that "we will not wait forever" to reach an agreement which would give much greater access to China's vast market of 1.25 billion people for European firms.
"We have been talking for Tuesday and Wednesday. Now we have to make an effort to get up to speed because we are not there yet," said Gooch.
Lamy described his meetings with Zhu and MOFTEC Minister Shi Guangsheng as "hard work" and "constructive", but he declined to comment on the substance of the talks.
Asked if a deal could come this week, he said: "I don't know ... we are too early at this stage for any sort of prognosis."
EU officials have described the opening round of talks on Tuesday as frank and constructive, although they are pushing for a range of concessions that go further than the landmark Sino-US deal in November.
Chinese officials have signalled their optimism that a deal will be struck during this round of talks after forging agreements with Thailand, India, Argentina, Colombia, Poland and Kyrgyzstan in recent weeks.
But so far China has made no comments on the talks.
The European Union is the last of China's major trading partners to conclude a trade liberalization deal, a prerequisite for Beijing's membership of the World Trade Organisation.
However China also has to reach bilateral trade deals with Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico and Switzerland.
WTO director general Mike Moore said Wednesday China could still become a member of the global trading body if it sealed the agreement with the EU and the smaller trading partners soon.
"It's a major move forward if a European deal is done, just like it was a major move (in November) when the US deal was done," Moore told reporters in Brussels.
China gave the impression the last round of Sino-EU talks in February broke up on the edge of a deal, but the EU side said there were major differences on issues such as market access for European telecom and insurance companies.
In the telecommunications sector, EU concerns revolve around protecting foreign manufacturer access to China's burgeoning mobile phone market.
There are worries the implicit or explicit use of quotas will block foreign firms' access to the growing telecoms service sector.
The European side has also been pushing for more than 51 percent foreign ownership rights for European telecom companies in joint ventures.
In the landmark Sino-US trade deal agreed in November, US telecoms companies were only given the right to gradually take 50 percent stakes.
The EU also has specific requirements related to the demands of each of its 15 member states. There are 300 to 400 products where it exports more than the United States -- such as Italian leather, French wine and British gin.
The latest round of Sino-EU talks come as the US Congress prepares to debate whether to give China permanent normal trading relations, a status that would guarantee China every year the same low-tariff access to US markets as products from most other countries.:
