PETER MANDELSON called on China yesterday to open up its markets to foreign imports and to play a more active role in international negotiations to liberalise global trade.

The European Trade Commissioner’s comments came just days after he had brokered a deal in Shanghai to limit until 2007 the increase in Chinese textile sales to the EU and coincided with moves leading to a potential clampdown on Chinese shoe exports to Europe.

“European companies want more open markets and predictable rules for doing business in China. They need to be able to sell into the country’s growing market,” he said.

Mr Mandelson insisted that Beijing should honour the commitments that came with its recent membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In particular, he emphasised that as tariffs are lowered, these should not be replaced by non-tariff barriers and that intellectual property rights should be fully respected.

Europe’s leading trade negotiator urged China to use its increasing political and economic weight to play a prominent role in ensuring the success of the Doha development round of trade negotiations.

“The mini-ministerial in China next month will be a key test. China has a tendency to sit pat on its newly acquired WTO status. That is not good enough,” he told a seminar on EU-China relations organised by the Centre for European Reform.

In marked contrast to the United States, which has taken an openly aggressive and unilateral stance against the increase in Chinese imports, Mr Mandelson spent much of the past few months trying to negotiate an agreement with Beijing. After ten hours of talks at the weekend, both sides agreed to limit the increase in imports of ten categories of Chinese textiles over the next three years to between 8.5 and 12 per cent.

“What I found was a serious engagement with a very well- researched and worked-out negotiating position that augurs rather well for the future. The experience we went through was a significant demonstration of China’s growing maturity,” he said.

Faced with China’s expanding economic strength, Mr Mandelson insisted that political activism, not protectionism, was required.

However, the Trade Commissioner said that he was launching an inquiry to determine whether Chinese shoes are being dumped on the EU market. Representatives of Europe’s footwear industry had pressed the Commission yesterday to impose emergency anti-dumping duties on Chinese shoe imports, which have risen by 700 per cent since the start of the year.

If the inquiry finds that the shoes are being sold at below production cost price, the EU could impose additional duties.

RISE AND RISE

It is the world’s biggest exporter of bicycles, toys, microwaves, televisions and many consumer electronic goods. It produces more than half the world’s shoes

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