China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 was hailed as
the natural conclusion of a long march that started with the reforms of
Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s. However, China’s participation in the WTO
has been anything but smooth. Its self-proclaimed socialist market
economy system has alienated its trading partners. Two diametrically
opposite approaches have been proposed to deal with the emerging
problems. One is to demand that China changes its economic regime. The
other is to stay idle and accept that the WTO must accommodate different
economic regimes, no matter how idiosyncratic. In this paper, we argue
that there is a more promising third way. In our view, the problems
posed by China arise from the fact that, while in the past the GATT/WTO
had to address the accession of socialist countries or of big trading
nations, it never had to deal with a big, socialist country like China.
In order to retain its principles while accommodating China, the WTO
needs to translate some of its implicit legal understanding into
explicit treaty language. We advance specific proposals to this effect.
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