China's 18 years in the WTO: resilience through multilateralism

China had to submit its transition policies and measures for consultation and review with WTO member countries during the first eight years of its membership. This part of the accession protocol was called the Transitional Review Mechanism and had not been a component of other protocols.

In the process, thousands of legal documents had to be translated into English, which China was accused of delaying from time to time. At its accession, China was nominated for "non-market economy" status, which implies domestic prices in China may not be used to compare production costs in case of an anti-dumping investigation by a third country. This rendered China easily susceptible to frequent anti-dumping measures implemented by its trading partners. Although it was informally agreed that by 2016 China's "non-market" status would be up for review and may be revoked, this has yet to happen.

But in spite of some arduous requirements imposed on the Chinese economy, China has, as expected, benefited from its WTO membership. Through its own structural reform efforts and global market access opportunities, China climbed rapidly to become the world's largest exporter by 2010, sooner than most predicted.

Since 1978, when China began to open up, its economic performance – in terms of overall growth, lifting people out of poverty and international competitiveness – has been unsurpassed. In financial terms, progress has been made to clean up shadow financing activities, while the renminbi has been accepted as a global currency by the International Monetary Fund, which included it in the Special Drawing Right basket – international currency reserves to supplement member countries' official reserves.

In December 2018, at the 40th anniversary gathering in Beijing to commemorate China's reform and opening-up, President Xi confidently called the four decades "a glorious process".

Amid all these positive outcomes, China was mindful of the unfinished reform agenda. Back in 2007, former premier Wen Jiabao gave a timely warning concerning China's adopted economic development model, saying it had become "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and ultimately unsustainable." This urge to deepen reform in China gained more traction from the report "China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious and Creative Society ", a joint effort by the Chinese government and the World Bank.