Introduction

China's historic accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in November 2001 not only represents an important milestone in China's integration into the global economy, with significant impact on its own economic development and reforms, but is also among the most important events in the history of the WTO and the multilateral trading system. As the year 2011 marks the tenth anniversary of the country's entry into the WTO, China's decade-long experience should provide us with some valuable preliminary evidence for assessing Chinese behavior in the liberal international economic regime. Such an assessment is timely as it can not only help us understand China's role in the evolving structure of global economic governance, but can also shed light on the broader debates about the implications of the rise of China for the international system and the challenges of integrating a large number of transition economies into the liberal international economic order.