There is no topic that is more hotly debated in China and more important to the country's future than the anticipated accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). After 13 years of efforts to achieve membership in the world trade body, the United States and China finally reached agreement in November 1999; shortly thereafter the European Union and China came to agreement and negotiations moved on to Geneva where a working party is expected to formulate a protocol of accession that will allow China to enter the WTO by late 2001. Ironically, after years of fuming that the West was trying to keep China out of the trade body, the prospect of actually joining has set off a flurry of speculation over the impact on China's economy and many have begun questioning the benefits of membership. Many worry that China's industries will be exposed to crippling competition, that farmers will be hurt by the import of cheap (and better quality) foreign wheat and corn, and that China as a nation will become entangled in a global capitalist network that will erode the country's sovereignty and, in the worst case scenario, reduce China to an “appendage” of the West, particularly the United States.

China's application for accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) raises particular questions about the implications for China's legal system. This article examines these issues by reference to Chinese contexts and perspectives, and by examining the processes of accession and what these mean for further legal reform. It concludes with a discussion of possible approaches that might prove useful in managing China's relationship with the world trading system.

China has agreed to the fundamental principles for accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) with its principal trading partners. The United States and the European Union have, over a period of months, completed the arduous negotiations to conclude these agreements. These two major agreements are very close in content and will become the blueprint for China's accession in 2001.

A Brief History

In terms of growth and revenue, China's telecommunications sector is arguably the jewel in the crown of the socialist market economy. What was formerly the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (MPT), and is presently the Ministry of Information Industries (MII), has throughout the 1990s produced phenomenal revenue and phenomenal growth.For useful studies on China's telecommunications industry development, see John Ure (ed.), Telecommunications in Asia: Policy, Planning and Development (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995); Milton Mueller and Zixiang Tan, China in the Information Age: Telecommunications and the Dilmenas of Reform (Center for Strategic Studies, 1997), and most recently, focusing on equipment manufacture rather than the service sector, Xiaobai Shen, The Chinese Road to High Technology: A Study of Telecommunications Switching Technology in the Economic Transition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999). Beginning with Deng Xiaoping's historic trip to Shenzhen in March 1992, China's reform-minded leadership recognized the importance of telecommunications infrastructure to the success of urgent economic growth. Revenue growth for the MPT was strong throughout the decade, growing over 1,600 per cent. Postal services did well, but the phenomenal growth was in telecoms. From 1991 to 1999, telecommunications revenue grew 2,050 per cent against total postal service growth of 375 per cent. In 1999, combined turnover for post and telecoms reached 331.1 billion yuan (US$40 billion), of which telecommunications activity contributed 311.2 billion yuan, or 94 per cent (see Figure 1). As a result, the Ministry became increasingly focused on the telecommunications sector.

Many areas of China's economy stand to see change from WTO accession, from agriculture to insurance and banking to telecommunications. Among the sectors affected, the automobile industry, as an old-line heavy industry, seems one of the most open to a global challenge. Since its reorganization in the post-Mao Zedong reform era, China's auto industry has been nurtured in a protectionist environment. Joint venture companies have satisfied domestic passenger car vehicle needs, but price and quality problems have left the industry open to some challenge in a free market post-WTO world.

As of mid-2001, after six or seven years of massive bloodletting from the rolls of state-owned firms, one stark outcome is apparent. No one, and certainly not the central government, knows how many once-state workers have been removed from their posts. This article aims to characterize the chaos rampant in discussions of this programme, the human side of the dismantling of the state enterprise system, from a number of angles. My material leads me to argue that it is impossible to come to any kind of statistical judgment about China's current unemployment, particularly one drawing upon official statistics, which, because they are based upon extremely restrictive definitions, are fundamentally flawed. Government-generated data also throw into question any inferences about the plight of those moving in and out of the state of joblessness.

Much recent research on the Chinese economy has centred on analysing changes in the personal distribution of income in China since 1978. The purpose of this research has been both to delineate the trend in income inequality over time, and to “decompose” this trend into its component parts. Some of the most important recent studies include Azizur Rahman Khan, Keith Griffin, Carl Riskin and Zhao Renwei, “Household income and its distribution in China,” The China Quarterly. No. 132 (December 1992); Keith Griffin and Zhao Renwei (eds.), The Distribution of Income in China (London: Macmillan, 1993); Scott Rozelle, “Stagnation without equity,” The China Journal, No. 35 (January 1996); World Bank, Sharing Rising Incomes (Washington D.C.: World Bank, 1997); Li Shi, Zhao Renwei and Zhang Ping, “Zhongguo jingji zhuanxing yu shouru fenpei biandong” (“China's economic transition and changes in the income distribution”), Jingji yanjiu (Economic Research), No. 4 (April 1998); Azizur Rahman Khan and Carl Riskin, “Income and inequality in China,” The China Quarterly, No. 154 (June 1998); Lin Yifu, Cai Fang and Li Zhou, “Zhongguo jingji zhuanxing shiqi de diqu chaju fenxi” (“An analysis of regional inequalities during China's transition”), Jingji yanjiu (Economic Research), No. 6 (June 1998): Hy Van Luong and Jonathan Unger, “Wealth, power and poverty in the transition to market economies,” The China Journal, No. 40 (July 1998); Tsui Kai-yuen, “Factor decomposition of Chinese rural income inequality,” Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol. 26, No. 3 (September 1998); Li Shi and Zhao Renwei, “Zhongguo jumin shouru fenpei zaiyanjiu” (“The Chinese income distribution revisited”), Jingji yanjiu, No. 4 (April 1999); Dennis T. Yang, “Urban-biased policies and rising income inequality in China,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings (May 1999); Li Shi, Zhao Renwei and Carl Riskin (eds.), Zhongguo jumin shouru fenpei zaiyanjiu (The Chinese Income Distribution Revisited) (Beijing: Zhongguo caizheng jingji chubanshe, 1999). Important early studies include E. B. Vermeer, “Income differentials in rural China.” The China Quarterly, No. 89 (1982); Lee Travers, “Bias in Chinese economic statistics,”The China Quarterly, No. 91 (1982) and Irma Adelman and David Sunding, “Economic policy and income distribution in China,” Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol. 11, No. 3 (September 1987). This list takes no account of the large number of studies which have looked at the distribution of per capita output using data on gross output value, net material product and GDP. The central conclusions to emerge are that income inequality has increased sharply during the transition era, and that spatial factors – particularly a rise in inter-provincial income differentials and an increase in the urban–rural gap – have played a key role in the process. The policy conclusion which has usually been drawn is that the Chinese state needs to dismantle the remaining restrictions on labour mobility because these have served to prevent the fruits of growth from “trickling down” from urban areas and the eastern provinces to the Chinese hinterland.

Hong Kong was for several years consistently rated as one of the best places in the world to do business by a number of influential comparative international assessments.The Fraser Institute, Economic Freedom of the World Report (Vancouver: Fraser Institute, various years), Heritage Foundation, Index of Economic Freedom (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation and Dow Jones & Company, Inc., various years), International Institute for Management Development, World Competitiveness Yearbook (Lausanne: International Institute for Management Development, various years), World Economic Forum, Global Competitiveness Report (New York: Oxford University Press, various years), Economist Intelligence Unit, Global Country Forecast (London: Economist Intelligence Unit, various years). However, most of these periodic assessments have recently downgraded Hong Kong, citing government actions as the main reason. This article addresses two questions suggested by Hong Kong's apparent decline: does its government understand what the factors are that had hitherto made Hong Kong such an advantageous business location; and are such factors susceptible to preservation and enhancement by government action?

The coercive repression of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators in Beijing on the night of 3–4 June 1989 is one of the starkest human rights violations of recent times. For a government to kill peaceful, unarmed citizens is a violation of the “right to life” that is provided in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments. In addition to the immediate cost in lives – my co-editor Perry Link and I consider the death toll to be still an open question, because the only related document in the collection is the self-interested report of the Beijing Party Committee to the Politburo – Tiananmen set a repressive political course for years to follow. June fourth marked a sharp clash between alternative futures. On that night China made a decisive turn away from liberalization and back toward an authoritarian kind of politics.

The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Gao Xingjian on 12 October 2000 surprised not only the Chinese-reading public but also the rest of the world. No Chinese writer had ever won the prize since its inception in 1901, so there were mounting expectations that an author from China might be named. The veteran novelist Ba Jin and the exiled contemporary poet Bei Dao were frequent suggestions, but Gao's name was rarely mentioned. There had also been rumours concerning Taiwanese writers. Beyond the field of Chinese literature specialists, amongst whom he was known primarily as a playwright and not as a novelist, Gao was largely unknown, or rather he was little known to Anglophone readers, for in France and Sweden his novel Lingshan (Soul Mountain) had been published and acclaimed in the mid-1990s. Naturally, being translated into Swedish made his works more accessible to those who judge the Nobel nominees, but several other Chinese writers had been similarly translated into Swedish, notably by Gao's translator Göran Malmqvist, and many more have been rendered into English and French, languages which present no obstacle to the judges, the Swedish Academy.

With Gao Xingjian's winning of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature and the controversy it generated, scholarship on Gao in English becomes crucial to understanding the landscape of Chinese cultural studies (both local and diasporan) during the 1980s and 1990s. Chinese spoken drama, severely under-studied and under-acknowledged in both Asian studies and theatre scholarship, has become a topic of sudden interest since the Nobel was bestowed on Gao last year. The relative paucity of English-language book-length sources on contemporary Chinese huaju (which include only four anthologies and even fewer single-author published manuscripts) means that studies that do reach the reading public potentially have tremendous impact on how this complex topic spanning the past century of Chinese cultural and political history is perceived. It is for this reason that I read Henry Zhao (Zhao Yiheng)'s Toward a Modern Zen Theatre with both considerable excitement and unexpected disappointment.