China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Chen Jian, said Thursday. Chen's remarks came during a week when a senior United States official, Under Secretary of Commerce Jefferey E. Garten, was conducting a series of, sometimes contentious, trade talks in Beijing, and suggested Chinese uncertainty over support among WTO members, especially by the United States, for Beijing's membership. Indeed, the issue of China's WTO membership is very much on the minds of people involved in these trade talks. Mr. Garten and China's Foreign Trade Minister, Wu Yi, engaged in a public argument at a conference in Beijing earlier this week, as Ms. Wu angrily accused Mr. Garten of violating a promise to support China's membership in the World Trade Organization after he told reporters on the eve of the trade talks that such support depended on further steps to open China's market. In February, U.S. and China signed a landmark intellectual property rights agreement and U.S. took a step forward to supporting China's effort in joining WTO, an attempt blocked by the U.S. at the end of last year over the trade disputes.
Market access is a thorny issue between the United States and China.
It is also the major block for China to join the World Trade Organization. China has argued that it should be allowed entry on political terms, treated the same way as other developing countries are. American and European trade officials, however, maintain that China's status as a major world trader should join on the same rules that apply to other industrial nations, i.e., on commercial terms. For the United States, aside from pressing for the rules to change, the Clinton administration is also taking an advocate's position by urging China to approve specific projects. However, he admitted no breakthrough in his talks with Chinese officials.