ABSTRACT
China’s accession into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/ World Trade Organization (WTO) is arguably the most important and comprehensive foreign economic decision Beijing has made during the reform era. China’s WTO membership signifies China’s full integration into the global economy from the position of a previously isolated and planned economy. The extended negotiation process reflects the difficulties of achieving this transition in China, economically as well as politically. Thus, a close examination of China’s GATT/WTO decision-making sheds light on foreign economic policy-making in China in the current era. The findings from this chapter illustrate that domestic ministries’ protectionist preferences and poor internal coordination problems were direct obstacles to the central government’s GATT/WTO policy formulation. The close linkage between bureaucratic politics and foreign policy-making characterizes China’s fifteen-year GATT/WTO negotiation process.
