Political arch-rivals China and Taiwan look set this week to achieve informal approval for their separate entry to the WTO -- a move experts say will bring momentous change to the body.
Current WTO member countries are expected to give the nod to Beijing on Thursday and to Taipei on Friday, almost the final step for two of the globe's leading trading powers after years of frustrating negotiation and delay.
Suggestions that China might face a fresh obstacle over maintaining total ownership rights of local operations for the major US insurance company AIG have been dismissed by both AIG and Chinese officials, and diplomats said they saw no problem.
Approval of the admission terms for China and Taiwan by two working parties will not quite complete the formalities but both will almost certainly have taken up their seats in the Geneva-based organization by early in 2002.
"That will really be a historic moment for the WTO," said the body's director-general, Mike Moore, in a recent interview.
"Everyone recognizes things will never be the same again."
Trade ministers of the 142 current WTO member countries are set to give formal approval for admission, on the two working parties' recommendation, at a conference in Doha, Qatar, from Nov. 9 to 13.
After that, both China and Taiwan have to summon their parliaments to ratify the entry packages and then notify the WTO that this has been done. Exactly one month later, they are automatically admitted.
For China, the world's fifth largest exporter and sixth importer of manufactured goods, this will be a triumphant end to 15 years of negotiation on how far it will open up its once strictly state-controlled economy. For Taiwan, ninth in the global export league and 10th in the import table, it will put an end to nearly half a decade of sitting on the sidelines -- and suffering -- while the mainland and the major WTO trading powers haggled. Both see one major advantage of coming under the WTO umbrella: the protection that the trade body's rules will offer for their often highly competitive exports from what they say are unfair barriers erected by many countries.
In the WTO, discrimination -- or the imposition of higher tariffs on goods from one member country than on the same item from another -- is generally barred.
If a member perceives a violation of this principle, most-favoured-nation or MFN, it can challenge the action through the WTO's dispute settlement system and if found in the right can win redress.
So for both, WTO entry holds out the prospect of a big drop in the anti-dumping measures -- normally duty surcharges slapped on goods the government of an importing country says are being sold at below production cost -- taken against them.
For Taiwan, which will be admitted as the customs territory of Chinese Taipei, this is an especially burning problem as it faces an economic downturn made worse by the global slowdown.
But clearly for Beijing, where economic reformers have battled more traditional communist officials to push forward with WTO entry, membership will lock in liberalization of a hidebound industrial and agricultural system.
Trade diplomats say the ups and downs of the negotiations since 1986 -- when not dictated by strained relations with the West over human rights issues or international crises -- have clearly reflected that internal Chinese struggle.
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