Former EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy, a front runner to head the WTO, yesterday urged China to take a more active role in global talks to free up commerce.
China's lagging role in trade talks "is an issue which I think needs a bit more debate with this country," he said.
Lamy told a gathering in the resort town of Boao that China and the region should recognize that multilateral trade opening has worked well for them.
China became a member of the WTO in late 2001 after concessions that experts agreed would change its economy beyond recognition. It is now a full-fledged party to talks for new rounds of trade liberalization.
"Not that China is not participating in the negotiations. China is participating," Lamy said.
"But [it's participating] with this notion that as a recently acceded member its main strategic and tactical goal is to pay as little as possible," he said.
China's rationale, he said, is that "in joining the organization, China got many benefits -- and we see that in textiles for instance -- but it also had to pay a bit of a price in terms of domestic liberalization."
The WTO's next ministerial meeting will take place in Hong Kong in December as efforts continue to wrap up the troubled Doha round of trade liberalization talks.
By then, it will be more than two years since the last ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico which failed in reaching agreement.
When the Cancun talks ended without result, China was believed to be among a group of developing nations strongly against subsidies to farmers in developed countries.
Lamy was speaking at the Boao Forum for Asia, a gathering of businesspeople, officials and academics that China hopes to eventually develop into a counterpart of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Lamy has been named the favorite among four candidates in the first round of consultations to pick the successor to Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi, whose term ends on Aug. 31.
Supachai said that the world must seek improved rules on regional trade agreements as part of the coming global trade talks.
Regional trade agreements that benefit some countries and exclude others have mushroomed in recent years, partly as a result of the failure of the Doha talks.
Lamy said many of these limited arrangements never succeeded to get off the ground.
"The number of bilateral free-trade negotiations that start is increasing," he said. "The number of bilateral free-trade negotiations that finish is not very big."
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