It took China 15 years of exhausting negotiations to join WTO - but it could have joined its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) with a simple letter in 1971 and been a founder member of WTO by 1995.
This was one of the revelations of Long Yongtu, China's chief WTO negotiator who has most to be proud of on Sunday when his country is finally admitted to WTO at a ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar.
From 1992, Mr Long headed China's team to rejoin Gatt and since 1995 has been head of the WTO negotiating team. In an interview published in the latest issue of Cai Jing (Finance & Economy) magazine, Mr Long is finally able to look back over those 15 dramatic years and vent his anger against the Americans, now the negotiations are over.
The talks need never have taken place at all if in 1971, China's ambassador in Geneva had sent a letter to the Gatt secretariat.
'The Gatt secretariat sent us an invitation. If we had had a sufficient understanding of Gatt, rejoining would have been a simple matter,' says Mr Long. 'Our ambassador could have sent a letter saying that China was willing to join. Then, at Gatt's next meeting, we could have been a member.'
But the ambassador never wrote the letter. Chairman Mao Zedong believed that Gatt was a club for the rich in which China had no place, and the country was locked in the Cultural Revolution, so the invitation went unanswered.
