One Billion Customers - James McGregor [29]
Fortunately for Long, Zhu understood and appreciated what Long told him. Zhu ordered Long to reopen discussions immediately and said he himself would become involved. At about 3:00 A.M., Chinese negotiators called U.S. negotiator Bob Cassidy at his hotel and asked him to bring his team to the foreign trade ministry at 5:00 A.M. for more discussions. Cassidy called Barshefsky at 6:30 A.M. and said that it looked like China wanted a deal. Barshefsky came over and resumed discussions with Shi, although she was fully prepared to leave if there wasn’t immediate progress. Her bags already had been sent to the airport.
While Barshefsky and Shi were talking, Zhu Rongji caused a huge stir at the National Economic Work Conference when he rose and walked out just as Jiang Zemin was beginning his keynote speech. The audience immediately began whispering among themselves. Was Zhu walking out to show his disapproval? Were the two leaders at odds? The truth was that Zhu was leaving the conference to meet with Barshefsky to settle the final deal. He had just obtained approval from the party’s central standing committee to do the deed. Most remarkable was that Zhu was willing to cede protocol and travel to the foreign trade ministry rather than summon the negotiators to his own reception hall.
Barshefsky was on the verge of heading for the airport when Zhu arrived. He wasted little time with small talk. With a sheaf of typed and handwritten notes in front of him, Zhu plowed through the sticking points of the talks. I will give you this, you give me that. I will give one here, you give one there. The master was at work. Everybody else in the room was a spectator. Zhu had complete command of the brief. He knew exactly where his political limits were. A few hours later Barshefsky thought she had the best deal she could get. She took her lieutenants with her to the only private room she could find, the women’s restroom, so they could call Clinton for the final approval. Her dialogue with Clinton, who was aboard Air Force One, was interrupted when a toilet flushed and a shocked female Australian journalist emerged from a stall.
In the end, the agreement mollified two of the biggest critics in the Chinese government, telecom and insurance officials. From the April pacts, China now would allow foreigners to own only 49 percent instead of 50 percent of insurance companies, and foreign ownership of telecom value-added services was reduced to 50 percent from 51 percent. In exchange, Zhu sped up the timetable to open various cities for these businesses. Otherwise, it was the same basic agreement that had been offered in April: There were significant openings in telecom, insurance, banking, professional services, the right of foreigners to directly import, export, and distribute products and quotas for farm product imports. After Zhu and Barshefsky reached agreement, their underlings huddled to fix the final language for an afternoon press conference. When foreign ministry officials showed up and tried to insert a boilerplate about Taiwan, the trade ministry officials, their position now endorsed by China’s leaders, tossed the foreign ministry minions out of the room. That afternoon Jiang Zemin met with Barshefsky in front of the TV cameras to praise the agreement as a milestone for China’s integration into the world of international business. They met in an imperial audience hall overlooking the island pavilion where the Guangxu Emperor had been imprisoned in 1898 after attempting Western-style reforms.
After negotiations with the European Union and others that improved on some of the U.S. terms, China joined the WTO on December 11, 2001—some 208 years after Lord Macartney opened the negotiations. Zhu Rongji retired in 2003,