The evolving EU-China trade relationship since China's WTO accession

Abstract

In today's world China is becoming more important in the economic platform with a rapid expanding economy. It has been increasing its trade both with neighbouring countries and other strong nations such as the European Union and the United States. It started as one of the founding members of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, however due to an unstable political situation, it didn't continue to form part of it. It later tried to gain founding member status with the World Trade Organisation, failed but continued to persist until it gained accession in 2001. In 1985 the Agreement on Trade and economic cooperation was signed in Beijing. Since then, China and the European Union tried to conclude agreements and trade to mutually benefit their economies. A number of agreements were reached and the European Union tried to help China with its World Trade Organisation accession amongst other things. Upon accession Europe also took the role of monitoring that China complied with its World Trade Organisation accession. China on the other was always reluctant when it came to give concessions and comply with all of the World Trade Organisation obligations it signed in the World Trade Organisation Accession Protocol. In my dissertation I want to create a more clear view of how the European Union and China started their bilateral relation and what agreements were or still are in action. I decided to first give a brief historical perspective of China and Europe. China and the European Union became even closer partners as China acceded to the World Trade Organisation, and hence I wanted to see how the first dialogues led China to accede the World Trade Organisation and what the European Union thought of this and even the bilateral agreement that it signed with the European Union before joining the World Trade Organisation. After acceding to the World Trade Organisation, the European Union played an important role in monitoring China and making sure it fulfilled its obligations and thus I tried to see what are the mechanisms involved that the European Union is using to monitor China. Along with the fact that China had many issues with keeping its obligations such as protecting Intellectual Property Rights, increasing transparency and reducing tariff and non-tariff barriers, Monitoring China obligations created some tension with the European Union. In fact there were a number of disagreements and disputes, with the European Union opening 7 disputes against China in the World Trade Organisation, and China filing 3 disputes against the European Union. This dissertation mainly focuses on agreements and speeches, which concern trade relations between China and the European Union. Unfortunately, for my dissertation there were not a lot of books available as it is only recently that awareness is being created about this trade relation, so I was a bit limited. I tried to make up for the missing books by referring to a large number of news articles, agreements, speeches and journals online. Political and media influence might affect data however I tried to find this data using multiple sources including statistics from World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Eurostat and World Trade Organisation to name a few.