Peter Gallagher

A curi­ous fact about WTO: you don’t need to be a coun­try to join. The basic require­ment is sov­er­eignty over a cus­toms ter­ri­tory. That is, you have to be able to set the tar­iffs and local taxes of a defined geo­graph­i­cal area. So ‘cus­toms ter­ri­to­ries’ such as HongKong [once UK, now China] are wel­come as full WTO mem­bers. Taipei [China] is also in this cat­e­gory as far as WTO is con­cerned: it joined WTO imme­di­ately after China. Another fact: mem­bers have a con­trac­tual rela­tion­ship with each other. It’s not sim­ply a joint enter­prise like, for exam­ple, the United Nations founded on a treaty. It’s actu­ally a con­tract in which each mem­ber exchanges spe­cific rights and oblig­a­tions with other mem­bers on a rec­i­p­ro­cal, bilat­eral basis. But the hope that this peace­ful reci­procity would lead to other exchanges between Tai­wan and China is, so far, vain accord­ing to this “China Post”:http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/detail.asp?ID=43063&GRP=E report of a Har­vard study. bq. While most hoped that Tai­wan and China join­ing the WTO would pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity for both eco­nomic and polit­i­cal break­throughs between the two side, in real­ity, there have been no sub­stan­tial developments