China Talks With Major Powers On Wto Entry Next Week

China and its major trading partners will hold a new round of talks in Geneva next week on Beijings bid to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO), diplomats said on Wednesday.

They said a Chinese delegation would have bilateral talks and talks with groups of key powers including the United States, the European Union and Japan and take part in meetings of the WTO working party studying its application.

We will certainly be looking for more signs of flexibility from China, said one envoy involved in the long-running negotiations, under way for over a decade.

Another trade diplomat said the talks which come three weeks after WTO Director-General Renato Ruggiero urged Chinese leaders in Beijing to polish up their market-opening offers would show just how fast China was now ready to move.

 

We need to see what they come up with and just how flexible they are ready to be. This session will set the pace for the rest of the year, he added.

The last Geneva talks were in early March, and both Chinese and big power negotiators said they made good progress. China used the occasion to announce it would grant foreign companies the right to engage in import and export trade.

Chinas top WTO negotiator, assistant foreign trade minister Long Yongtu, is currently holding talks with EU officials in Brussels in preparation for next weeks session.

But diplomats say Long is returning from there to Beijing and will only join the Geneva discussions to cover agriculture, services, and the extent of the promised trading rights among other issues at the end of next week.

A U.S. team, headed by Washingtons new top China trade negotiator Robert Cassidy, is presently in Beijing. Cassidy, an assistant deputy trade representative, will travel to Geneva at the weekend for next weeks discussions.

There had earlier been signs that China, sensing growing hostility in the U.S. Congress towards trade concessions to Beijing, might hold back on its WTO bid.

But trade sources say Ruggiero was encouraged by the reponse from senior Chinese officials to his plea for them to focus on making their offers in all areas as liberal as possible.

The message was that they should come up with a good market opening package which would make it difficult for Congress to rebuff them rather than hold back for fear of being rebuffed, said one diplomat.

Although Congress could not under present legislation prevent the U.S. administration agreeing to Chinese entry to the WTO, it could bar the granting of permanent most-favoured-nation (MFN) treatment.

MFN, under which WTO countries agree to extend to all other members the best trading conditions they grant to any one of them, is an underlying principle of the trade body.

But a member can insist on waiving MFN for individual countries with which it has special political as well as trading problems. The United States already exercises an MFN waiver against Cuba, a founding member of the WTO.

Ruggiero, who does not take part in the negotiations, said at the end of his April visit that he was optimistic that Beijing would eventually win admission, although tough discussions still lay ahead.

Trade diplomats say the most likely scenario, if all goes well next week and during another Geneva session likely in July, would be for China to be admitted in time for 50th anniversary celebrations of the global trading system in spring next year.

Those festitivities, to coincide with the two-and-a-half-year-old WTOs second ministerial meeting, will mark the creation of the bodys predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or Gatt.