Japan, China Agree on WTO Terms

Japan on Friday became the first major industrialized country to agree on terms for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, a step leaders hope will revive prospects that Beijing could join the trade body by year’s end.

Japanese officials, speaking during Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi’s first visit to China, announced that Tokyo and Beijing had successfully concluded talks on opening up the service sector and other parts of the Chinese economy to foreign competition. Officials said the bilateral agreement made China’s entry into the WTO acceptable to Japan--the world’s second-largest economy.

The announcement raised hopes that WTO negotiations between Beijing and Washington, on hold since April, might be revived. China has backtracked on or withdrawn some previously offered concessions and has refused to negotiate with the U.S. and other NATO countries since NATO’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in May.

But trade observers warned that the Sino-Japanese accord, details of which remained under wraps, does not necessarily increase pressure on Beijing and Washington. Tokyo’s concerns are different from Washington’s, officials said. U.S. officials had little to say.

“We find it a good sign that China is continuing to negotiate with non-NATO countries, but the ball is in their court to resume the negotiations,” said Helaine Klasky, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative in Washington. “We’re ready and willing to go back to the table with the Chinese.”

The support of the leading industrial nations, particularly the United States, is a political prerequisite for China’s admission to the world trade body. Those countries first want bilateral trade agreements with China.

Looming over the stalled U.S.-Sino negotiations is a major deadline this fall, when WTO member countries gather for another round of bargaining that could result in even tougher standards for entry to the WTO than now exist.

“Both sides are aware that a window is closing here,” said a Western diplomat who follows the talks. China and the U.S. “have got to get this done” by November, when an Asian Pacific economic summit is scheduled, he said.

Officials on both sides said that the just-concluded talks focused, for the most part, on the service sector, including telecommunications; a goods protocol between the two Asian nations had been settled on two years ago.

The accord between Tokyo and Beijing had been widely anticipated for some time, diminishing its impact on the stalled talks with Washington.

“This was expected,” said one diplomatic economic attache here. “Obuchi’s trip was planned a long time ago. It’d be hard to see how this would [add] extra pressure.”

And the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which killed three people, remains a raw wound. China’s trade minister, Shi Guangsheng, said that Beijing “has not changed its stand, viewpoint or attitude on its accession to the WTO. But now is not the proper time to resume WTO talks with . . . the U.S.,” the official New China News Agency reported.

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Times staff writer Brian Golson in Washington contributed to this report.