On the evening of January 21st, the second lecture of HUST CI-UFMG Online Camp: Contemporary China was held successfully. Associate Prof. Zhong Xiwei, from School of Economics at HUST, was invited to give a lecture on “WTO and Foreign Trade of China”. It was hosted by Prof. Ouyang Hongbing, Vice Dean of School of Economics at HUST.

In 2020, although challenged by complicated international situation and punched by Covid-19 pandemic, the scale of China’s foreign trade broke the record, and China was the only main economy who owned positive growth of trade in goods globally. In 2021, with the background that China will further expand opening-up, what’s role and function of WTO? How will China’s accession to WTO impact on Foreign Trade of China? These questions are widely discussed and heated topics nowadays, which also constitutes the main content of lecture today.

Associate Prof. Zhong commenced the lecture with introduction of WTO, which exhibited history, structure, and tenets of WTO. She remarked that there are a number of ways of looking at WTO. WTO is an organization for liberalizing trade, a forum for governments to negotiate trade agreements, a place for them to settle trade disputes and an operator of a system of trade rules. In the interaction with students, Associate Prof. Zhong pointed out that Brazil is also a member of WTO and Roberto Azevêdo, the former director-general of WTO till 2020, is from Brazil. Associate Prof. Zhong gave an overall introduction of China’s accession to WTO. Since China entered to WTO in 2001, it has provided non-discriminatory treatment to all WTO Members and contributed to efficient operation of multilateral trading system. For better understanding of WTO and foreign trade of China, Associate Prof. Zhong extended to another two related topics, “trade in service” and “anti-dumping”.

In Q&A, Associate Prof. Zhong answered students’ questions professionally and comprehensively. Due to her experience of being in charge of educational affairs in Chinese embassy to Spain, she encouraged Brazilian students to apply for CSC scholarship to study in China and witness Chinese economic development by themselves.