I write to call your attention to a new Trade Winds episode on Zoom on July 15, when China’s ambassador to China, Zhang Xiangchen, gave an excellent presentation on the need to preserve and reform the WTO and to improve multilateral cooperation. He explained that China will consider the externalities of its economic policies. It is so refreshing to hear a national trade minister defend multilateralism and international rules and to take note of the problem of “nonbelievers.” I continue to be embarrassed that the US trade minister has acted like a virus in seeking to undermine world trade law and to foment protectionism. Peterson Institute Fellow Chad Bown also gave a thoughtful presentation. Bown proposed what China could do to help combat Covid-19. Bown also noted today that in our Covid world, everybody is bailing out everybody and so he wondered what acceptable disciplines on industrial subsidies can be agreed to. The program was nicely moderated by Anabel González.
I also want to call your attention to my new essay on the WTO just published in Public Jurist available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yJr9dq8xmEyT7_8uFMj2wkLEFmbAvhPg/view.
At the end of that essay, I opine:
“As this essay goes to press, China has taken steps to undermine the rule of law in Hong Kong. When Hong Kong entered the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986, it did so as a “separate customs territory possessing full autonomy in the conduct of its external commercial relations and of the other matters provided for in this Agreement.” When China entered the WTO in 2001, it did so through a unique Protocol of Accession that imposed dozens of applicant WTO-plus obligations on China. In recent years, this harvest of China-specific disciplines has been criticized for being insufficiently bountiful. An examination of this Protocol demonstrates that whatever the nature and strength of the WTO’s prescriptive authority, the WTO did not use that authority in 2001 to impose any requirements for how China would treat Hong Kong in the future. In other words, China entered the WTO with discretion to determine the extent to which Hong Kong would keep “full autonomy in the conduct of its external commercial relations” and autonomy in the other matters provided for in the WTO Agreement. Twenty years later, one can look back to see that in this respect, the WTO should have done more for Hong Kong.”
