Introduction

China's accession to the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) is of great interest and entails significant challenges to GPA Parties due to the size of the Chinese state sector and the complexity of her government procurement regime.

GPA Parties have been trying to persuade countries seeking to join the WTO, including China, to commit to joining the GPA upon WTO accession. However, China firmly rejected the proposition that GPA membership should be a precondition for China to join the WTO, and only undertook to ‘initiate negotiations for membership in the GPA by tabling an Appendix I offer as soon as possible’ upon WTO accession in 2001. This commitment was incorporated in China's Accession Protocol at the time of its WTO accession. After almost five years of inaction, China, under constant pressure from its major trade partners, made the first move towards fulfilling that commitment in April 2006: as an outcome of the ongoing Sino-US trade dialogue, China committed to table an offer of GPA coverage (the so-called ‘Appendix I offer’) by the end of 2007 which would signal the initiation of China's GPA accession negotiation. This commitment was also reinstated in the course of China's 2006 WTO Trade Policy Review.