He told a symposium on China's WTO Entry and Asia's Common Development at the annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA), which opened Friday in the seaside resort of Boao in Hainan Province, that the changes would come in the next few years and comply with WTO rules.

China was deepening its opening-up in various ways, said Sun, including widening the areas it opened to, framing laws to safeguard the opening policy, and shifting from unilateral opening to mutual opening with other WTO members.

China's WTO entry would improve the multilateral trade system, said Sun, and the country would take an active part in a new round of global trade negotiations at the WTO Doha meeting to help perfect and draw global trade rules.

He said that China's economic cooperation with other Asian countries had been progressing well, and its WTO entry would extend the space for trade exchanges among Asian countries. With a population of 1.3 billion, China was expected to achieve a total import and export volume of 680 billion US dollars with basically balanced import and export volumes in 2005.

Sun added that China, as a developing country, would open its service departments gradually.

Sun said the country would work effectively to help cement Asia 's position in a new multilateral trade system, protect developing countries' legal rights and build a new international trade order.

Though China's WTO entry would intensify competition in particular scopes in some countries, it provided much more market- opening chances and opened China as a sizable market for Asian countries, said Sun. China would develop trade cooperation with Asian countries based on equality and mutual benefit.

He pointed out that since there were many uncertainties in the current world economic development, Asia could only withstand risks and achieve stabilization and common prosperity through intensifying mutual cooperation.

(People's Daily April 13, 2002)