An Assessment of the Impact of China's WTO Accession

China is expected to have entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) toward the end of 2001, 15 years after negotiations with other General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/WTO members began in earnest. The international consensus seems to be that China's impact on the WTO will be comparable to that of Japan when it joined the GATT in 1955. With an eye to the possible consequences for the United States, members of the U.S. Congress have opposed China's WTO membership. This raises the need to reconsider the impact of China's entry into WTO on world markets. The major question is whether the rapid economic growth and high export growth rates that China achieved over the past 20 years will in fact accelerate even further, as was the case after Japan joined GATT. Is this a realistic assessment?