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Je voudrais remercier au Ministre Le Maire et au Secrétaire d’État Lemoyne de m’avoir invité. À Genève, moi et mon cuisinier, nous sommes en train d’apprendre le français. Mon cuisinier a fait des peogrès rapides. Il peut retenir le nom français de tous les plats, car il regarde chaque semaine le programme TOP Chef de la Chaîne M6. Je progresse lentement, mais j’aime beaucoup la langue française et je vais persévérer dans mes études. J’espère prendre la parole entièrement en français à la prochaine fois.
Like the most Chinese, I naturally like the word reform. In the past 40 years, the reform in China has not only changed my country, but also changed my own path in life, allowing me to have access to higher education and travel outside China to appreciate the world we live in today.
A country needs to keep up with the new developments, and so are the international organizations. WTO is no exception. The Doha Round has been dragging on for years. Over the past decade, the hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural subsidies in the developed members have remained largely unchanged. But at the same time, new forms of business, such as e-commerce, have flourished across the world. WTO is not providing international norms to address any of these issues. What is even more alarming is that the organization seems to be losing effectiveness to rein in the rampage of unilateralism and protectionism.
For all these reasons, WTO needs a reform. But the reform should be in the right direction and taking the right approach.
First, the reform needs to be firmly set in the course of fighting against unilateralism and protectionism. It has to push for worldwide trade liberalization and investment facilitation. It has to stick to the principle of non-discrimination and adopt a democratic approach. Reform is not to reinvent the wheel. The existing rules must be fully respected and faithfully implemented. Reform is not an excuse for not implementing the rules, and any such attempt should be met with resistance from the members.
With respect to making new rules for new forms of business activities, we should allow members, maybe starting with groups of like-minded ones, to explore these issues, but we also need to duly consider the views and needs of the developing members and fully consult with them. Only through an inclusive process, can we maybe eventually reach multilateral outcomes.
Second, we need to prioritize and take a step-by-step approach, and stay away from moonshot targets. If, through consultations and negotiations among the members, we could expeditiously restore the proper functioning of the dispute settlement mechanism, achieve an agreement on fishery subsidies in 2019 as we planned, make progress on the new topics such as e-commerce, investment facilitation and MSMEs, make improvements in terms of transparency. If we can achieve these targets at the MC12 in 2020, I think we can already call it a success. China is willing to play a proactive and constructive role, and to make contributions within its capacities.
Third, the WTO is a public good, not a tool for meeting particular needs of someone or some group of members. Excuse me for being a bit blunt here, but if someone wishes, in the name of reform, put China in a tailor-made straightjacket of trade rules to constrain China’s development, I think they will be very much disappointed at the end of the day.
Globalization means competition. We all know that in competitive sports, abiding by an agreed set of rules of the game is vitally important. Same applies for trade. Winning a game should be done through strengthen and hard work, not by altering the rules.
My predecessors, Ambassador Sun Zhenyu, Yi Xiaozhun and Yu Jianhua all loved playing ping pong. And we know that for a long time, the world ping pong championship used to be almost dominated by Chinese teams. But some saw this as a problem. To win in the games, some countries have pushed International Table Tennis Federation to make targeted reforms to change the rules of the game for ping pong, so that the Chinese team cannot benefit from the certain so-called “advantages”. They have made the ping pong ball larger, changed the 21-point rule to the 11-point rule, and even set the maximum height for a toss serve. However, none of these reforms have changed much the results of the Chinese teams.
Of course, I also have the examples from the opposite side. China’s man’s football team has just made it once to the world cup finals, despite there’re hundreds of millions of football fans in China. So someone thought, what if we could mix the football and Chinese Kungfu, maybe that will help get the Chinese team to the world cup? People actually made a movie on that. Of course, that movie is rather for entertainment than for the reform of the football rules. I’m just giving this example to say that we all have what we want, but we need to be pragmatic, not to waste our time on unrealistic targets. If it is a real reform, we’ll go ahead with it, if it is a trap, it’s best for all of us to stay away from it.
For the issues where members have divergent views such as subsidy, transfer of technology, we can have different forms of dialogues while respecting each other’s positions. For example, on excess capacity, we can discuss if the root cause of excess capacity is in the contraction of global demand due to financial crisis, or is it in the subsidies by some countries. We’re willing to discuss these issues, but we’ll not take views forced onto us. Professor Simon Evenett from the University of Saint Gallen has done an insightful study on this topic and I advise we could all have a look at his report rather than making a conclusion too fast.
In that spirit, I listened carefully in a humble manner this morning, of the comments, the concerns and even the complaints about China’s policies and practices on state owned enterprise, industrial policies as well as technology transfer requirements. We will study them carefully, and to see if some of them could be taken into account in the process of domestic institutional reform. We would like to be engaged in the dialogue and discussion with our counterparts bilaterally, regionally and multilaterally. Actually, we established a high-level working group on the WTO reform with the EU, and Denis and I are the members of the group. China has already decided to co-sponsor the EU’s proposal on the Appellate body, and we will discuss much more broader issues with regard to the WTO reform. We will also put forward China’s WTO reform proposal soon. Having said that, I need to make a clear distinction, i.e. dialogue and discussion are not negotiation. We don’t think there are common understanding and convergence to conduct any specific negotiation on the controversial issues in the WTO at this stage.
People sometimes say that the WTO is a patient in a critical state with multiple failing organs. If that is the case, urgently resorting the functioning of the organs and making the right diagnostics of the illness is more important that rushing to give prescriptions. Today’s discussion might be a group consultation of doctors to identify what is the cause of the illness and work on a plan for proper treatment. We might have many such group consultations in different formats so that we can have the right understanding of the issues and provide the right solutions.
We all know where the crisis of WTO comes from, but whatever a particular country or a particular individual thinks about the WTO, it can only serve as the context rather than the reason for the reform of the WTO. Of course, we have to prepare for the worst, but I don’t want to spend too much time on hypothetical scenarios. I just want to say that we will, within our capacities and responsibilities, work hard to push for the right reform of the WTO.
Thank you.
