BOOK REVIEWS

David Smith and Zhu Guobin eds., China and the WTO, Going West

The very least that can be said about this legal work is that it is not devoid of originality. Indeed, China and the WTO, Going West sets itself the task of analysing China's accession to the WTO from the perspective of the Go West Policy, that is to say the deliberate policy of the Chinese government aimed at developing the western part of its territory. Hence, the book's co-editors, David Smith and Zhu Guobin, presuppose in the introduction that “the entry of China into the WTO and the opening-up of the Great West are closely connected” in so far as they both result from a “strategic policy making by the Chinese Central authorities” and will have a “major impact on China's political, economic and legal cultures”, at the same time as “dramatically affects the scope and nature of investment in the country” (p. 3). The growth and diversification of the regional distribution of foreign direct investment by dint of the reform and rationalisation of Chinese business law are thus deemed to flow logically from Peking's participation in the WTO.

China and the WTO, Going West is consequently centred around three chapters dealing respectively with the legal system and judicial reform, the transformation of the law on investment and national heritage, and finally, the sustainable development of the western regions. The first of these, “Legal Order and Judicial Reform in Light of China's Accession to the WTO and its ‘Go West' Policy”, contains a certain number of quality contributions (in particular, Zhu Guobin on local protectionism, pp. 75-92), but also some repetition and incongruities: was it really useful to have two rather similar articles on the question, admittedly fundamental, of judicial control (Li Chengbin and Zeng Lingliang); and what is there to say about the text on the possibilities of expansion of law firms in China—must we imagine hordes of under-employed lawyers from Hong Kong making an assault on Qinghai or Xinjiang province?

Michael William Dowdle, however, brings a dissonant voice to bear amidst all the praise, wondering whether the WTO may not be “an obstacle” to Chinese legal development (pp. 35-40). This short text attempts to show from the failure of the experience of the China Securities Regulatory Commission that the long-term transformation of the Chinese legal system could in actual fact be restrained by a strict application of WTO principles (“reductive development”), contrary to a pragmatic approach, that is, one taking into account various models of development and allowing the emergence of civil society. It is a shame nonetheless that this interesting viewpoint on the limits of the assimilation of international norms by Chinese law is not backed up by more argument and documentation.

The second chapter, “Law Reform, Foreign Investment and Property Rights Under the WTO”, gives an overall and well-informed view of business practice. The third chapter, “Sustainable Development in the West—Environmental and Resource Policy”, opens with a curious piece: a case study of traditional Chinese medicine. Although this subject is not without commercial interest and may be perfectly well studied from the perspective of international law, as done by Bryan Bacher, it is hard to understand its direct relation to the WTO. In fact, this approach simply relays the opinion of the Chinese government and mouths the media propaganda that would have it that all areas of socio-economic life are profoundly changed—for the better—by China's participation in an international organisation that is fundamentally responsible for the regulation of commercial exchanges.

The two chronologies are well presented, but they contribute to underlining the rather superficial and limited nature of the argument being proposed. Indeed, while it is true that China entered into negotiations in order to regain its status as a contracting party to the GATT in July 1986, the second chronology, which retraces the principal stages of the policy of development of the Chinese west, begins only in 1999 with Jiang Zemin's speech at that time (p. xxiii).

The work, which does not contain any real bibliography, ends with a single appendix (not with three as stated in the introduction) intended to provide evidence for the proposed argument: a note from the State Council on the measures taken regarding the development of the Chinese west. However, one finds among these provisions the idea of the application of preferential principles, a “miracle recipe” destined in actual fact to disappear if China respects the commitments that it undertook in order to join the WTO.

Starting out with an original, albeit limited, approach, China and the WTO, Going West unfortunately comes across as an uneven work, somewhat of a catch-all piece, produced with excessive haste, and leaving the reader with an impression of confusion that is no doubt related to the incoherency inherent in the Chinese way of dealing with this matter.

Translated from the French original by Peter Brown