China free trade talks drag on, and on, and on
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
China free trade talks drag on, and on, and on
By Mary-Anne Toy, Herald Correspondent in Beijing
23 June 2007
Chinese philosopher Laozi said a thousand-li journey starts by taking the first step, but Australia’s free-trade agreement team is looking decidedly footsore.
The ninth round of talks in Beijing concluded on Friday with few signs of progress.
Official negotiations opened in May 2005, but after two years of talks and feasibility studies, Australia and China have yet to agree on what is to be included in the "comprehensive, high quality" deal.
Chief negotiator Ric Wells’s team of 40 officials from a dozen departments will return to Canberra with negotiations on cutting tariffs for farm and manufactured goods still stalled and nothing substantive to report.
Australia refused to continue talks on tariffs after the seventh round ended in December unless the Chinese submitted a substantially better offer.
This week, Chinese officials repeated that they were still preparing to do so, but the timing remained vague.
Mr Wells told a Senate estimates committee last month that China wanted to exclude from the FTA key areas including education, telecommunications, financial services, competition policy, investment, electronic commerce and government procurement.
The official line is that this week’s meeting went slightly better than the previous round, with signs of limited progress on mainly technical issues such as whether telecommunications, education and financial services should be dealt with separately or lumped together in one chapter of an FTA - although this does not amount to an agreement that those areas will be included in the final deal.
In the context of the now lowered expectations for this FTA, which would be China’s first with a developed nation, one of the most positive things the Australian negotiating team had to say was that nothing went backwards, as has happened previously.
The Chinese did not raise the issue of Mr Wells’s frank assessment at last month’s Senate estimates that the reason for the slow pace was that "the Chinese Government doesn’t want an FTA".
This explanation, despite the public commitment of China and Australia’s politicians to striking a deal, would explain the pace of progress.
So far, it has taken state visits by President Hu Jintao or Premier Wen Jiabao to motivate government departments to step up the pace.
The Chinese have indicated they wish to find some sort of "breakthrough" that can be announced during Mr Hu’s visit to Australia in September when he is due to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum in Sydney.
Last week Trade Minister Warren Truss called the negotiations "tortuous" and admitted they had gone on longer than expected.
