HONG KONG -- In the 23 years since Deng Xiaoping opened China to the outside world, it has become one of the world's great trading nations. Now the further onrush of foreign trade is to be used as a forcible stimulant to hasten China's economic reform and to enhance modernization. So Dec. 11, the day China finally joined the World Trade Organization after a grinding 15 years of protracted negotiations, should have been a date that will live in history.
Instead, with deep irony, it has been one more period that illustrated China's unreformed political ways. It served as a reminder of the mistaken belief held by China's top Communist leadership that economics can be separated from politics, and that the venerable political way of doing things is still relevant at the beginning of the 21st century.
The very fact that WTO membership is being seen as a means to force economic changes that have not been, or cannot be, made by more direct political means hardly testifies to political modernity. China hopes that the WTO will have an impact in areas where the Communist Party currently fears to tread, as in the case of numerous loss-making state-owned enterprises. Many of these SOEs should have been closed down or reformed years ago. Instead the government hopes that the competition engendered by freer trade, and greater imports into the Chinese market, will do that job instead.