Sunday is the 10th anniversary of China’s joining the World Trade Organization — a membership that helped turn China into the world’s biggest economy after the United States. Companies and consumers worldwide have benefited from China’s emergence as a top trading partner. And yet, because of special breaks and loopholes for China when it joined the W.T.O., it still shields its domestic markets from foreign competition much more than any other big nation.
Consider that $49 microwave oven and $85,000 Jeep.
Microwave oven prices have plunged in the West over the past decade, largely because China has combined inexpensive labor, excellent infrastructure and heavy factory investment to produce the ovens and a wide range of other consumer goods for export, making creature comforts more affordable to customers around the world.
Further, W.T.O. rules against protectionism have made it difficult for countries in the West to limit China’s sixfold surge in exports during those 10 years, even as the Chinese flood of products has forced factory closings and layoffs elsewhere.
But price tags on imported cars at dealerships in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities signal how China has continued to protect its home market under the special terms of the W.T.O. agreement it negotiated before joining the trade group.
In the United States, prices for a Detroit-made Jeep Grand Cherokee start at $27,490. But in China, after tariffs and other protective fees, it sells for $85,000 or more. (It’s no surprise that Chrysler has sold fewer than 2,500 of them so far this year in China.)
Foreign trading partners often chafe at the way China uses the W.T.O. rules to its advantage.
The Chinese economy’s “spectacular rise would not have been possible without the open global trading system that China was able to benefit from during the past 10 years,” said Karel de Gucht, the European Union’s trade commissioner.
“At the same time,” he said, “China is having to increasingly recognize and respect not only the legal responsibilities it now faces as a member of a global rules-based body, but also the W.T.O. ‘spirit’ of promoting open markets and nondiscriminatory principles.”
Chinese officials have been effusive in the run-up to their W.T.O. anniversary. “We believe that our 10-year arrangement has been successful — the results of the past 10 years are welcome and a valuable inspiration,” Yu Jianhua, China’s assistant minister of commerce, said at a news conference last month in Beijing.
The roots of China’s economic model trace to the singular terms under which the nation joined the World Trade Organization, which now has 153 members.
Based in Geneva, the group was established in 1995 as the successor to an international framework called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade — GATT, as it was known — that had been mapped out in the early years after World War II.
After negotiating for 15 years to be admitted to GATT and then to the W.T.O., China was finally let in after agreeing to accept the W.T.O.’s broad free trade rules. But as all new members do, Beijing also had to negotiate a lengthy document, known as an accession agreement. It spelled out thousands of details tailored to the specifics of the economy of China, which then was still very much a developing country.
The agreement required China to lower its tariffs to levels below those of many other developing countries. But compared with most industrialized countries, China was allowed to impose considerably higher tariffs — tariffs China has retained even as its economy has subsequently grown to No. 2 in the world.
The clearest example of W.T.O. ascendance China-style may be in automobiles. Even though China’s auto manufacturing industry and car market are now both the world’s largest, China continues to shelter them behind the highest trade barriers of any large industrial economy.
It retains a prohibitive tariff of 25 percent on imported cars, for example, which helps explain why imports represent only 4 percent of the light vehicles sold in China.
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