China: 10 Years after Joining the WTOOn December 11,001, China officially joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), making the dream of several generations of Chinese people come true. Since then, looking back at what happened, Pascal Lamy, director-general of the WTO, gave an “A+” rating for Chinas performance in the WTO in the past ten years.On November 15, 1999, China and the signed the bilateral agreement. On May 18,000, China reached an agreement with the European Union. These two agreements eradicated the largest obstacle for China in joining the WTO. In001, Shi Guangsheng, then the Minister for ForEign Trade in China, signed the agreement on Chinas joining the WTO. From submitting the application on July 10, 1986, to finally joining the WTO, China went through 1years of negotiations and meetings. Zhu Rongji, former Chinese premier, once said that he and his contemporaries would see their hair turn grey before hearing of China joining the WTO.More Challenges than OpportunitiesMost people do not understand the difficulties and unease during the negotiations of the WTO. When recalling the current situation, Zhang Xiangchen, director of the research office of Chinas Ministry of Commerce, said:“The biggest difficulty at that time was whether joining the WTO would bring us benefits or harm. Some of us worried that the auto industry and tariff in China would be affected after joining this organization. Fortunately, 10 years have past and our worries never became a reality.”In order to make more precise judgments, Zhang Xiangchen and his colleagues spent a lot of time and energy on analysis and forecasting and proved that joining the WTO was a correct move for China. This reassured people present at the negotiation. However, as Zhang Xiangchen said, the correct move did not mean that there were no problems. For example, there were disputes over reducing or completely removing tariffs for some products. The result proved that it would be unimaginable if the tariffs for some products were completely removed.It is not an exaggeration to say that China went through complete changes after joining the WTO; the country began to improve in all respects and began to be integrated into the world; its strength went up and the reform deepened; it has become more international- ized and the Chinese government and enterprises have passed the test.It is worthwhile to mention that China has developed from theth largest economy to thend largest economy in the past ten years. According to data from the World Bank, the economic growth rate of China exceeded 10% in010 and accounted for5% of global economic growth. Thus, China has been the engine of global economic growth for two straight years.Wang Xinkui, president of Shanghai WTO Affairs Consultation Center, is a good witness of the changes in China in the past ten years after joining the WTO. He recalled that the whole country was cheered up by the news that China had joined the WTO in001.“In the first ten years after joining the WTO, China faced more opportunities than challenges. Then, in the next ten years, China had to face more challenges than opportunities,” said Wang Xinkui. He thought that the Chinese economy still had a lot of uncertainties due to its fast development. For example, China took the place of Japan as the second largest economy in the world in010, but China was far behind Japan in its number of multinationals and global brands.An example Wang Xinkui listed was that China was the champion in export capacity, with Germany in the second place. But if we check the export volumes of these two countries carefully, we will find that the value of commodities exported from Germany is much higher than the ones from China. Wang Xinkui said that the data sometimes could be deceptive and Chinese people should not be blinded by some glorious data. “We need a clear mind to make a correct judgment of our role in the world and the global economic situation before making the right decision. It is worthwhile to mention that China should not neglect the development of multinationals after going through0 years of fast economic development and globalization, which created the current economic and trade situation dominated by global enterprises. Reports from different institutions showed that multinationals were still the most active elements in the global financial economy. In China, ZTE and HuawEi are typical representatives of Chinese multinationals that experienced development after China joined the WTO. However, there are quite few companies like these two in China.Actually, “joining the WTO” meant the “arrival of wolves” for many Chinese before001. At that time, many Chinese domestic enterprises thought foreign companies could cross the lowered tariff and trade barrier and directly compete with them. But the result proved that there was a two-way influence. On the one hand, “joining the WTO” opened up quite a large number of industries to forei