ABSTRACT
On September 18, 2001, in the lobby of a hotel in central Geneva, China was granted entry to the WTO. This date, coincidently enough, marked the eighteenth meeting of the Working Party for the Accession of China into the WTO (WPAC).1 For almost 16 years the WPAC had been entrusted with the task of negotiating China’s entry into the multilateral trading regime as defined by the GATT and then the WTO.2 After many years of often torturous negotiations, China and its future GATT partners (represented by the working party) concluded their negotiations with a Working Party Report that was several hundreds pages in length and a Protocol of Accession that was nearly 900 pages long once annexes were included.
