Speaking at the Asia-Europe Business Forum on Sunday, Fu said that since the WTO's inception in 1995, foreign countries had launched more than 700 cases against China, including dumping investigations and government subsidies for exports.

"One out of seven cases of anti-dumping has been against China. China has become the country with the most trade disputes in the last 11 years, resulting in a loss of US$40 billion to $50 billion (Bt1.5 trillion to Bt1.87 trillion) in exports and 3 million jobs each year," he said.

He said China had become the centre of global attention with its spectacular economic performance over the past 25 years, as average real growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) was 9.6 per cent annually, with the growth rate reaching 10.9 per cent in the first half of this year. China's trade in goods and services amounted to almost 75 per cent of GDP, compared with 25-30 per cent for the US, Japan and the EU. From 1990 to 2004, the accumulated remitted dividends of foreign investors in China amounted to more than $250 billion. Since joining WTO, China's external trade has more than doubled, from $620 billion in 2002 to $1.4 trillion last year.

However, while some have blamed China for stealing jobs from their countries, Fu said that in fact his country had felt even more pressure, because it had 12 million unemployed and a new workforce of another 12 million emerging each year seeking employment. And these numbers are increasing year by year. But he said China had not yet resorted to protectionism, because it understood that such a measure would only damage the country's competitiveness and eventually worsen its employment situation.

Asian and European leaders are meeting in Finland for the sixth Asia-Europe Meet-ing (Asem) summit, during which the business sector is holding parallel talks. How to revive global trade talks under the WTO was a key topic during the business forum. How-ever, WTO director-general Pascal Lamy and European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson had to cancel their trips to Asem to go to Brazil for the Group of 20 meeting to discuss how to revive the Doha Round.

WTO deputy director-general Rufus Yerxa said to eliminate protective measures, countries should strive to revive the stalled Doha Round of multilateral negotiations. Yerxa said that with the stalled WTO progress, countries have recently shifted towards bilateral or regional free-trade agreements (FTAs), prompting the question of whether these two types of regimes are compatible. He said that although regional trade agreements had been the bedrock for peace and greater political stability, as in the case of the European Union, they had several downsides. For instance, the bilateral agreements deviate the resources of small countries from multilateral trade negotiations and also discriminate against countries that are not members of such agreements.

Second, when an FTA is negotiated by countries with different levels of political and economic power, the preferences tend to be on the side of the larger and more powerful market. Bilateral FTAs often involve legislative and institutional commitments on the part of the smaller and weaker market. This means that the smaller party will be paying with "hard currency" or legislation and deeper commitments while receiving from the larger country a quickly devalued currency. This is because the preference granted in a bilateral or regional FTA is like a currency that is constantly depreciating as other bilateral or regional agreements are concluded by the same partners.

Besides, Yerxa said all of the largest bilateral trading relationships in the world depended on the WTO for a framework. There are no agreements between key economies in the world, such as an EU-US or an EU-Japanese FTA.

Haruhiko Kuroda, president of the Asian Development Bank, said nonetheless that Asian economies had become more integrated, with one of the best indicators of this trend being the growth of intra-regional trade. While still at modest levels in Central and South Asia, intra-regional trade in East Asia rose from 43 per cent of total trade in the early 1990s to 55 per cent last year. This is higher than the 46-per-cent figure for the North American FTA and only modestly lower than the 62-per-cent figure for the 25 EU countries.

Jeerawat Na Thalang

The Nation

Helsinki