Yet the bet paid off for China. It has blossomed into the world’s greatest exporter and second-biggest importer. The marriage of foreign know-how, Chinese labour and the open, global market has succeeded beyond anyone’s predictions.
It is instead China’s trading partners who now contemplate its WTO membership with furrowed brows. They have a variety of complaints: that China exports too much, swamping their markets with cheap manufactured goods, subsidised by an undervalued currency; that it hoards essential inputs, such as rare earths, for its own firms; and that it still skews its own market against foreign companies, in some cases by being slow to implement WTO rules (notably on piracy), in others by suddenly imposing unwritten rules that are unfavourable or unknowable to foreigners. The meddling state lets multinationals in, only to squeeze them dry of their valuable technologies and then push them out.