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Legal Issues In The China-US Agreement On China's Accession To The WTO

Posted on:2003-01-16Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y M RenFull Text:PDF
GTID:1116360062480582Subject:International Economic Law
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
MotiveThe motives to write this thesis are :(1) The China-US Agreement removed an important obstacle for China's accession and resolved the annual "Most-Favoured Nation Treatment" issue between the two countries. The Agreement itself has very positive implication to China.(2) However, China would be subject to great challenge under some of the transitional legal measures in the Agreement. We have to find them out and think about the ways to combat them.Chapter 1 China's Accession to the WTOChina and the US signed the Agreement on China's Accession to the World Trade Organisation on 15 November 1999, which marked a milestone for China's WTO accession. This Chapter briefly accounts for the objective in writing this thesis. It gives the backdrop of China's accession and the stages of negotiations. The Chapter also provides an overview of the China-US Agreement The Agreement has two parts : the first part is on China's commitments to open up its market. The second part is on the market protection mechanism built up by the US.Chapter 2 Legal issues in the Cfiii^fl-XTjS AgreementThe Agreement has more than 200 pages. Only 11 pages have provided narrations and their contents are also relatively crude. When using the WTO materials to compare, I discover there are four legal issues in this Agreement. They are :Legal Issue 1 : Legal Relationship between PN'l'R and the AgreementPNTR China-US Agreement is a legal document itself. Both parties have their own rights and obligation under the Agreement. After the signing of the Agreement, the US side spent a lot of effort to the legislation on granting permanent normal trade relations (PNTR); and as a result incorporated the Agreement into the US law.In the Agreement, the US did not commit to grant PNTR to China in black and white. Nevertheless, Article 1 of the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) 1947 clearly stipulates : "any advantage, favour, privilege or immunity granted by any contracting party to any product originating hi or destined for any other country shall be accorded immediately and unconditionally to the like product originating in or destined for the territories of all other contracting parties, hi order to realize the China-US Agreement, thePagel [China-US (Summarized)]US had to grant to China, without conditions, the favourable treatment same as those granting to other WTO members. Therefore, granting China PNTR would be a must, otherwise China would not realize its commitments in the Agreement. This explains why the US Administration, down from President Clinton, used all their might to persuade members of House and Senate to get through the PNTR legislation. The relationship between PNTR and the Agreement can be summarised as follows :USRight(Access to Chinese market)Obligation(Grant PNTR to China)ChinaRight(Get PNTR from US)Obligation(Open the Chinese Market)When a contract is signed, the two contracting parties must have equal rights and obligation. I think this is an important legal issue. It was not mentioned in the Agreement explicitly, but was "agreed silently".Legal Issue 2 : Product Specific SafeguardProduct Specific Safeguard is discriminative in nature. This safeguard only applies to the import from China, but not other WTO Members. Under this mechanism, if Chinese products cause or threaten to cause market disruption to the US market, the US can request consultations with China. If it is evidenced that Chinese imports have caused market disruption, China will have to take necessary action to prevent ore remedy the disruption. If consultations Ml to lead to an agreement within 60 days, the US can invoke safeguard actions against Chinese imports. Unlike the WTO Agreement on Safeguards, the Product-Specific Safeguard contains neither a specific limit on the duration of safeguard measures nor provision for any mid-term review. As a result the Product-Specific Safeguard is more harsh than the WTO safeguards.To tackle this meas...
Keywords/Search Tags:Agreement
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