China actively seeking WTO deal

The head of the WTO on Tuesday rejected suggestions that China is not doing enough to help global free-trade talks but said Beijing is wary of agreeing to more farm tariff cuts so soon after joining the world trade body.
Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organisation, said Chinese negotiators were energetic behind the scenes in trying to advance the WTO's Doha round of market-opening talks. "China is engaged like hell in the negotiations, but their involvement does not take the same shape as the others," Lamy told reporters during a regular visit to Beijing.
"They don't do a press conference every other week to say what they want or what they don't want, but, still, they are very active. It's hugely important for them," he added. US and European officials have periodically urged Beijing to use its muscle as the world's fourth-largest economy to try to narrow differences in the long-running negotiations, launched in 2001 in the Qatari capital.
"I totally disagree with the notion that they are hands off in this round," Lamy said. "The Chinese are not satisfied with the actual status quo." For instance, China was very involved in negotiating the products on which developing countries would be spared deep tariff cuts. "Their negotiating stance is Chinese, not Brazilian. They don't advertise their negotiating role. They don't make big speeches about what they want or don't want," he said.
Lamy said China was comfortable with the vast majority of issues on the table in the Doha Round. But it was unhappy with proposals for lowering agricultural tariffs and capping fishing subsidies. As much as it wanted deep cuts in US agricultural subsidies and in EU and Japanese agricultural tariffs, China faced political constraints in offering in return to lower its own barriers to imports of farm goods, Lamy said.
Political memories were long in China, and some critics had not forgotten that the terms of China's WTO accession - in late 2001, at the meeting to launch the Doha round - were ambitious. According to the finance ministry, China's average farm tariff has fallen to 15 percent from 54 percent in 2001, compared with a global average of 62 percent. The EU average is around 25 percent, Lamy said.