March 14, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/financial/14cnd-china-wto.html Once-Secret China Trade Pact Is Unveiled in Exquisite Detail
By JOSEPH KAHN WASHINGTON, March 14 -- Raw fur skins of mink, whole, with or without head, tail or paws. Monolithic digital integrated circuits obtained by MOS technology. Pure-bred asses, mules and hinnies.
These are the turn-of-the-millennium equivalents of throw-weights and hard-target killers, the substance of diplomatic progress between world superpowers. These days, when the United States and China take confidence-building measures, they deal in provisionally preserved capers, not submarine-based missiles.
The Clinton administration, responding to Congressional pressure, today declassified and released a 250-page document, entitled "Agreement on Market Access Between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America." Both sides have hailed the agreement, signed last November, as their greatest diplomatic breakthrough since they re-established economic ties in 1979.
But if the agreement redefines relations between the world's most powerful country and its most populous one, it does so without much diplomatic wordplay or soaring verbiage. In fact, there are no more than a handful of passages that include full English sentences. It's less a treaty than a spreadsheet.
"I'm impressed by how incredibly boring it is," said a trade adviser to Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana. The adviser is almost certainly one of the few people outside of the United States Trade Representative's office to peruse the eye-straining micro-print, which, until today, had been distributed only to those with security clearances. But, he added, the importance of the accord is how little it leaves to the imagination.
"I don't think the United States has ever negotiated a trade agreement with this kind of specificity," he said. "It wipes out all the ambiguity."
In fact, for all the fine print, the agreement is a blueprint for commercial relations between China and the United States well into the 21st century. It charts how many films foreign producers can show in Chinese movie theaters (20), when foreign banks can start dealing in Chinese currency (two years after China joins the W.T.O.), and how much equity foreign telecommunications companies can hold in Chinese mobile phone services (49 percent). More generally, it enshrines in print China's commitment to allow capitalism to spread to nearly every region and into nearly every kind of economic activity, including many previously left up to the whim of Chinese bureaucrats.
President Clinton has called the agreement a cornerstone of bilateral relations. But he faces perhaps his last big legislative battle to get Congress to agree to one aspect of it: granting China permanent normal trade status in return for its commitment to join the Geneva-based trade organization on the terms negotiated.
Congress must decide whether to sacrifice its annual review of China's trade status, in effect pledge to guarantee the Communist country the same trading rights in the United States that most other nations have. A diverse coalition of Republican and Democrats, many of them concerned about human rights abuses and China's threat to use force against neighboring Taiwan, would like to deny China permanent normal trade status. Clinton administration officials have said the vote, which they hope will take place by Memorial Day, too close to call.