China awaits OK to join WTO

GENEVA -- China is confident it will be cleared to join the World Trade Organization next week, more than 15 years after applying for membership, and two years after trade officials started predicting its imminent acceptance. \nChinese Premier Zhu Rongji said in Brussels on Wednesday that the only obstacle to his country's membership is a dispute between the European Union and the United States over access to the Chinese insurance market. \n"If this obstacle is removed, I believe China will become a WTO member in November," Zhu said. \nChinese negotiators will meet with the WTO's 142 members at the trade body's Geneva headquarters beginning Monday in what they hope will be the final working meeting on the terms of membership for the world's most populous country in the body that sets rules on international trade. \nWTO members hope they will be able to approve China formally during a meeting of trade ministers in Doha, Qatar, Nov. 9-13. China would not actually become a member until 30 days after its parliament formally ratified the deal. \nChina has already started reducing import tariffs on certain products as it prepares to join the WTO. A cut in duties on automobiles in January has led to a surge in imports in the past few months. \nAt the same time, China's trading partners are preparing themselves for a big increase in the quantity of Chinese goods entering their markets. Even without Chinese WTO membership, the percentage of North American imports coming from China rose from 0.8 percent in 1983 to 7.3 percent by 1999, and that could rise steeply once China joins the WTO. \nChina also is nearly ready to open its new mission to the WTO, an angular, modernistic building in a prime location a few hundred yards along the shore of Lake Geneva from the trade body. \nSuccess next week depends on settling the insurance dispute, which centers around one paragraph in a document of more than 1,000 pages setting out the terms for China's membership. \nUnder the agreement, new life insurance businesses entering the Chinese market must be at least 50 percent Chinese-owned. Existing businesses, however, are unaffected. \nNew York-based American International Group has been operating in China since 1992 and is 100 percent U.S.-owned. The disagreement is over what would happen if the company wanted to open a new branch in China. \nThe United States says the branch would be part of the existing company, but the EU insists it would be a new business subject to the 50 percent Chinese ownership rule. \nSeveral European insurance companies operate in China, but they are already partly Chinese-owned. \nThe European Union said Wednesday it had received the guarantees it was demanding from China that all businesses, including AIG, would have to have 50 percent Chinese membership for new ventures. But AIG issued a statement saying it had "acquired rights" in China and it expected the U.S. government to defend that position.