The Philadelphia Inquirer | December 17, 2001
The move, though expected, is a milestone, reflecting the nation's desire to take part in the global economy.
Andrew Cassel
While we were all glued to the endgame in Afghanistan last week, something momentous was happening just a couple of time zones away from there.
China, the world's most populous nation, joined the World Trade Organization.
This wasn't news in the sense of being unexpected. The Chinese entry into the WTO had been negotiated over several years, and was finally approved at the international group's summit meeting in Qatar in November.
But the actual entry is a milestone because it starts a series of changes that have the potential to reverberate around the world in all sorts of ways.
One of the most respected correspondents in Beijing, Jasper Becker of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, said: "China's WTO membership marks the end of the nation's most prolonged internal debate in recent history, and is the culmination of the widest diplomatic negotiations it has ever conducted with the outside world."
To appreciate what's happening, you have to think about how many of the great events in world history have happened with China, as it were, out of the room. For centuries, the Middle Kingdom walled itself off - literally as well as economically and politically - and that tendency continued even after it became the People's Republic.
Only after Mao Tse-tung had passed did his successor, Deng Xiaoping, begin to cautiously open the country's doors to trade and development. Twenty years later, that process has brought dramatic changes: Investment is pouring in, cities are humming with construction, and hundreds of millions of people are seeing their living standards rise rapidly.
But no blanket statement is completely valid in a country of 1.3 billion; while millions progress, millions more live wretchedly, facing acute problems from illiteracy to malnutrition to AIDS.
Politically, too, China is a paradox; while there is vastly more freedom to speak, write and debate public issues than existed under Mao, authoritarianism, heavy-handedness and corruption remain government characteristics.
Will joining the WTO help to change this? That's the $64 trillion question.
On the one hand, as Becker observes in the introduction to his excellent book, The Chinese, regimes and dynasties may come and go. But "the Chinese state is probably the oldest functioning organization in the world, dating back more than 2,000 years" and dealing with its subjects in some ways that haven't changed much since then.
On the other hand, the global economy is a bigger and more powerful force today than ever before. The rewards of participating in modern international trade are vast - enough, at any rate, to have persuaded China's leaders to abandon their centuries-old attitude toward foreigners in general and Westerners in particular.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing visitors to China find these days is the open talk about the country's need to welcome foreign investment and trade. Even government officials freely discuss the need to remove legal and cultural barriers that inhibit a market economy.
That's why the Chinese invited Temple University to set up a legal-studies program at a university in Beijing two years ago. It is still the only program of its kind in China, teaching American legal practices to Chinese lawyers and judges.
"It's the economy," Temple Law School Dean Robert Reinstein notes simply. "You can't operate a market economy without a legal system."
The implications of this are both fascinating and profound. According to an American scholar I met in China this fall, the Chinese have traditionally regarded even the term "law" as nearly synonymous with "punishment." Judges and courts were simply part of the machinery through which the ruler controlled the ruled.
The idea of law as a way to redress grievances - even against the ruler - was, well, foreign.
But investment, enterprise and private ownership all demand a system that can settle disputes and secure property rights. And to function in the global economy, such a system has to at least be comparable to those of other trading nations.
Don't misunderstand; the Chinese aren't rushing to copy our adversarial court system or adopt the Bill of Rights. On the contrary, disturbing reports continue to emerge of secret trials, convictions without defense, and other things most Americans would consider rights abuses.
Nevertheless, there is hope for improvement, and it's mainly due to China's clear desire to participate in the global economy.The Philadelphia Inquirer:
