The agreement reached early Saturday morning between China and the European Union on their textile trade row will have a positive effect on China's ongoing efforts to settle disputes with other trading partners, said a Beijing-based expert on the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Saturday.  

The expert, Zhang Hanlin, is the director of the Research Institute on the World Trade Organization with China's University of International Business and Economics.

"The result of the negotiation, which is a win-win result in line with the WTO spirit, has balanced the interests of both sides," Zhang commented.

An unstable export environment for China's textile products is not good for the long-term development of domestic industries, he said.

Pushed by the Sino-EU agreement, the trade talks between China and the United States on textile exports are expected to make substantial progress in the near future, Zhang said.

Zhang, who had predicted earlier this month that the textile disputes would not lead to trade wars between China and the European Union or the United States, said he was not surprised at all when hearing the news of the China-EU agreement.

China and the European Union have been in a good political and economic relationship for a long time, said Zhang, who believed that the EU would not have taken tough measures toward China if its textile trade integration process had not met major frustrations.

Now that the two sides have readjusted their policies, they can sure reach consensus on a new basis, he said.

The Sino-EU agreement is certainly good news for China's textile industry, said Zhang. But he also warned that the Chinese enterprises still need to be cautious in expanding their production and export to avoid possible safeguard measures in the future.

(Xinhua News Agency June 13, 2005)