Study On Critical Mass In WTO Decision-Making

Since WTO was founded, it has established formal decision-making mechanism which contains Consensus and Voting rules. Later, WTO introduced a so-called ‘Single Undertaking’ decision-making rule in Uruguay Round. However, failure of Cancun Meeting and Doha Round reaching to a deadlock have indicated that the traditional ‘Single Undertaking’ rule has serious bugs, such as imbalance between fair and efficiency, low transparency, inefficient, undemocratic and so on, these factors result in deadlock of negotiations. In order to break the deadlock of negotiation, many scholars have required to reform the WTO decision-making rules and put forward idea of ‘Critical Mass’ negotiation mode.There are few research or working papers on reforming decision-making mechanism of WTO, especially lacking study on Single Undertaking rule and Critical Mass Theory mode, which result in misunderstanding of Critical Mass Theory mode. Many people often confused Critical Mass Theory mode with Single Undertaking rule, Variable Geometry mode, Green Room mode, Plurilateral Agreement mode. And study on legality, rationality, conditions, bugs and essence of Critical Mass Theory mode in WTO negotiations is in blank. Thus, this thesis analyzes Critical Mass Theory mode through comparative method, which tries to make up theory blank in domestic.This thesis includes four parts. Part one contains a brief overview of WTO Decision-making Mechanism, Negotiation mode and Critical Mass Theory. Part two contains a brief overview of Single Undertaking and a comparison between Single Undertaking and Critical Mass Theory. Part three contains three comparisons that between Green Room, Plurilateral Agreement, Variable Geometry and Critical Mass Theory, which lead to an overview of advantages(such as transparency, democracy, efficiency and fairness) of Critical Mass Theory. Part four analyses feasibility of application in post-Doha Round, and according to China’s global position, it also analyzes advantages of China applying Critical Mass Theory mode in WTO negotiation.