The Dynamics of China’s Accession to the WTO: Counting Sense, Coalitions and Constructs

This article probes China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO). China’s WTO accession deserves further analysis because much of the extant literature is divorced from the international relations (IR) literature. Moreover, while past analyses have considered external and internal factors shaping China’s stance towards joining the WTO, they have rarely gone beyond this to probing when particular variables mattered more. For its part, research that emphasises domestic factors falls short because it often treats such factors generically or fails to detail the path through which they affect issue identification, policy construction and implementation. This article addresses these lacunas by conducting a theoretically informed study of China’s WTO accession. While traditional interest-, power- and idea-based IR approaches to international governmental organisations (IGOs) capture various aspects of the story of China’s effort to join the WTO, they miss other critical features. This article argues that a leader-oriented cost-benefit model best explains China’s continued quest to become a WTO member, its aggressive pursuit of accession in the second half of the 1990s, and its willingness to tolerate very demanding WTO entry terms.