War With Cold Characteristics: How China Used the WTO Against America, a Historical Case Study

Abstract

In the 1989-2012 period, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) gained influence on the world stage vis-à-vis the United States of America (USA) in virtually all spheres of geopolitical competition, emerging in its present status as a near-peer competitor to the USA by the mid-2010s. While it is relatively simple to measure over time a state’s increasing gross domestic product (GDP), military procurements, and government budgets, determining a state’s increasing influence over an international organization is more difficult. Yet in an interconnected world, influencing and controlling international organizations as a pathway to power is deserving of analysis; to control an international organization is to set international norms in its domain. Trade was a domain that the PRC focused heavily on during this era. China’s national rise was built on the foundation of a booming export economy enabled by its world-beating manufacturing machine. China’s building of this machine took place during the American ‘Unipolar Moment’ which followed the Cold War; the inflection point of this era was China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in late 2001. Therefore, an important scholarly research gap emerges: how did China enter and then utilize the WTO during the 1989-2012 period? Was China’s national rise in part facilitated by the PRC’s focus on influencing the WTO? And if so, how did China do it, what did its leaders say about it, and what demonstrable PRC-positive outcomes came from these efforts? Specifically, this thesis seeks to establish whether there are demonstrable correlations between several factors regarding the PRC, the WTO, and its domain, trade:

PRC leadership statements regarding the WTO and trade; PRC budgetary contributions to the WTO; PRC nationals and influencers who impacted WTO decision-making bodies; and PRC-positive outcomes vis-à-vis the USA via WTO case analysis.

In addressing these questions, this thesis explores the mechanisms by which the PRC used the WTO to create PRC-positive outcomes during the 1989-2012 period.