Brussels, 18/10/2002 (Agence Europe) - During his visit to China on Thursday and Friday, European Commissioner Pascal Lamy said he was expecting serious bilateral dialogue over the World Trade Organisation's new trade round and that a team of experts would be flying to Beijing next month to launch the process. He said that China has also remarkably opened up to European ideas and he hoped this applied to the EU (alluding to disagreement over trade defence and safeguard mechanisms, technical barriers to trade, and agriculture). He added that they had had a good opportunity to work together on so-called new issues, like investment, public tendering, facilitating trade, and competition, which are "vital" for the EU and its companies and also have a wider impact. Lamy said these issues were connected with development, generally focussing on the fact that global government instruments were key to development, adding that the EU and China were emerging as two cardinal points in such a system and that EU/China cooperation was therefore becoming ever more essential.
Lamy discussed implementation of WTO agreements with his Chinese counterpart Shi Guangsheng, which he described as more proof that EU/China trade relations were more lively than ever. He hailed China's "huge" efforts to implement strong legislation over intellectual property, services and (on the technical front) a structure for allocating and managing quotas, all of which questions will focus EU attention on assessing progress in joining the WTO where they were not following a strictly formal approach, but a rather positive approach with regard to China. EU/China trade relations were of increasing importance with both China's imports and exports doubling in the past five years and the pretty substantial rise in the China's trade deficit with the EU has not gone unnoticed, added Lamy. It stood at EUR 45 billion in 2001, according to Eurostat.