ABSTRACT
The debate surrounding China’s ability to meet the requirements of the
World Trade Organization (WTO) accession package (‘‘compliance’’) has tended to focus on two levels: whether the Chinese government’s commit-
ment is genuine, or whether (presumably committed) leaders responsible for
agreeing to the accession package can enforce its WTO commitments by
potentially recalcitrant economic ministries and local officials – especially in
the face of social and economic dislocations caused, in part, by WTO-related
adjustments. While this discussion about compliance has been important,
there are deeper issues raised by the academic literature on comparative and
international political economy that cast a different light on the nature of Chinese accession. The purpose of this chapter is not so much to bring to
bear new empirical information about China’s WTO compliance but, rather,
to examine some key ideas from the broader political economy literature
that can help frame our understanding of the relationship between the
WTO as a globalizing force and the domestic politics of China’s trade
policy. Two parts of the political economy literature – international trade
policy and regulatory policy – offer much for us to consider. This chapter
attempts to take a modest step in this direction. The first of these two literatures – on international trade policy – takes an
‘‘outside looking in’’ perspective. Specifically, this literature sets forth crucial
assumptions about the nature of a country’s behavior in the WTO and
about the behavioral expectations inherent in the WTO as a trade liberal-
ization mechanism. The literature is useful in its suggestion that much about
China’s compliance situation is not unique and, indeed, is accounted for in
the WTO. The second literature addressed in this chapter concerns the
nature of the regulatory state in advanced industrial economies; here, the core interest is in both the extent to which ‘‘liberalizing’’ states regulate and
the institutions and means by which they do so. In contrast to the trade
policy literature, the comparative political economy literature draws our
attention to the internal regulatory structures that mediate trade liberal-
ization. The comparative scholarship on regulatory states suggests that
there are wide variations in how industrial economies actually liberalize
their economies – the institutional structures, ideologies, and policy instru-
ments used.
