[3][4] Assessing and enforcing compliance has become issues in China-US trade relations,[5] including how China's noncompliance creates benefits for its own economy.
Together with political reforms, China in the early 1980s began to open its economy and signed a number of regional trade agreements.
China aimed to be included as a WTO founding member (which would validate it as a world economic power) but this attempt was thwarted because the United States, European countries, and Japan requested that China first reform various tariff policies, including tariff reductions, open markets and industrial policies.
This shift also corresponded to the change in premiership from Li Peng to Zhu Rongji, the latter of whom strongly believed that China needed deeper economic restructuring.
[10] The World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 and related 1999 Seattle WTO protests were the penultimate step before Chinese accession.
After the two governments settled asset claims dating from the Korean War in 1950, Congress temporarily granted China most favored nation status in 1980.
[17][18] After China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), its service sector was considerably liberalized and foreign investment was allowed; its restrictions on retail, wholesale and distribution ended.