The Impact on China's Enterprises of Joining the WTO

It has been thirteen years since China inaugurated its application to recover its status as a signatory nation in the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) in July 1986; and it has been quite some time since China applied, in 1995, to become a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the interim, we have held more than twenty multilateral work group meetings and several hundred bilateral negotiations with these countries around the world. In these dozen or so years, China has made extraordinarily great efforts in many areas, including dealing with the reform of tariff- and nontariff-related measures of trade, arranging for opening up and loosening constraints on the treatment of citizens in the area of trade, opening up our services-trade markets, reforming our trade system and its regulations, reducing technological barriers, and so on. On April 10, 1999, China arrived at an agreement with the United States regarding an important part of the overall agreements necessary for China to join the WTO and signed the Agreement on U.S.-China Agricultural Cooperation. With this agreement, China acceded to eliminating import restrictions on wheat, citrus products, beef, and poultry from the United States and agreed to lift the ban on the import of wheat from seven states in the northwest region of the United States, as well as the ban on the import of citrus fruits from four states, including California. This is a crucial step, and it signifies that the negotiations on China's joining the WTO have reached a new level.