CAMBRIDGE, England -- So they finally made it. China has been admitted to the World Trade Organization. And so has Taiwan. Now that the bilateral and multilateral negotiations are over and China's trade partners have extracted all that they were able to in concessions from the new member, the fun begins. The WTO with China, and Taiwan -- sorry, "Chinese Taipei" -- as members is a very different organization from one without them. There are various areas of potential dispute.
As fellow WTO members, China and Taiwan are supposed to extend to each other Most Favored Nation treatment and to not discriminate against each other in trade and other areas covered by the WTO. But the Chinese have already indicated that they regard any disputes between the two members as being Chinese internal affairs, which is going to create some interesting problems for the WTO's lawyers. President Jiang Zemin recently reminded the world that China reserves the right to use military force in its disputes with Taiwan.
Many WTO members do not meet their commitments to the articles of membership in letter or spirit. It is up to other members who feel aggrieved by such failures to invoke the disputes procedures to force the errant countries to meet their obligations, if they feel strong or rich enough. The fact that India has never been challenged in this way does not mean that that country meets all its obligations; just that no other country has thought it worthwhile to bother using the WTO disputes procedures against it.