U.S. Support for China’s Accession to the WTO: Economic, Strategic, and Institutional Motivations

The United States supported China’s accession to the WTO primarily because policymakers believed it would advance three interrelated objectives.

1. The first was economic: Washington believed that China’s accession to the WTO, together with PNTR, would open the Chinese market much more broadly to American goods, services, and investment, without requiring the United States to make further major tariff concessions of its own. This was the official line of the Clinton administration: to secure market-access concessions from China and to lock in China’s pro-market reforms.
2. The second was strategic and political: an important part of the American foreign policy and economic establishment believed that integrating China into the international economic order would encourage domestic opening, further reform, greater predictability, and, over time, a China more deeply socialized into a rules-based system largely shaped by the United States. In other words, many in Washington hoped that integration would have a transformative effect.
3. The third was institutional: bringing China into the WTO meant channeling trade frictions into a multilateral framework of rules and dispute settlement rather than handling them mainly through bilateral confrontation. The idea was that conflict with a rising China was inevitable, but that it would be better managed inside a legal and institutional framework.

Yes, there is a substantial literature on this. Useful studies include work by Nicholas Lardy at Brookings and later at the Peterson Institute, which defended accession mainly in terms of market opening and Chinese economic reform; Peterson Institute case studies on the 1999 negotiations and the domestic political battle over PNTR; and more recent scholarship, including NBER work on PNTR and US-China trade, which helps distinguish between the original motivations of 1999–2001 and the ex post effects, which later became far more controversial.

Put very briefly: the United States wanted China in the WTO because it expected greater access to the Chinese market, more domestic reform in China, and a stronger multilateral framework for managing a relationship that was going to expand anyway. In retrospect, many scholars argue that Washington overestimated the liberalizing political effects of integration and underestimated both the domestic distributional costs in the United States and China’s ability to benefit from the system without genuinely converging toward the model many Americans had hoped for.