The Great (fire)Wall of China

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization..."

- Karl Marx

Besides a cool quote by Karl Mark, Reason Magazine has an interesting article on how to utilize the WTO against the Chinese government to open them up, not to corporate interest (though that's a component), but to the virtues and vices of the freedom of speech. Their argument is based around the elements of the Treaty China signed to join the WTO:

When China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 it agreed that foreign service companies would have the same access to markets in China as domestic companies do. Now the European Union and the U.S. Trade Representative office are considering an argument that the Great Firewall violates China’s obligations to permit free trade in services under its agreements with the WTO. Last year, in a working paper titled Protectionism Online: Internet Censorship and International Trade Law, the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) think tank argued that “WTO member states are legally obliged to permit an unrestricted supply of cross border Internet services.”

The idea here is to use their recent spat with Google as grounds to file a complaint with the WTO. The argument goes that state censorship violates the free trade agreement as it interferes with the ability of the Internet giant and other web companies to provide a service to the Chinese people. The article goes on to explain that while a ruling in a hypothetical complaint with the WTO doesn't guarantee compliance that it does in turn allow for legal retribution in the forms of tariffs on Chinese products.

Their is hesitation by the American Trade Representative to pursue this option which is reflective of the Administration's delayed reaction earlier this year to the hacking of Google by Chinese government officials. Because of the extremely close interdependency of the Sino-American economies any negotiation with China must be labeled: fragile, handle with care.