Update on China's GPA Accession Negotiations

At the meeting of the WTO Committee on Government Procurement held on June 2, 2021, for which the meeting minutes were just recently circulated, China provided some details on the status of its negotiation for accession to the Government Procurement Agreement:

... On Tuesday of the meeting week, China had submitted documents of 33 pages in response to 96 questions that had been raised by the European Union and Australia regarding China's Sixth Revised Offer. China was also working hard on questions that had been raised by other Parties. This fully demonstrated China's sincere willingness and great efforts made to accelerate the process of its accession to the GPA. Meanwhile, China was considering the possibility of further improving its offer. As all GPA Parties knew, this would not be an easy task and a large number of internal coordination work needed to be done. Therefore, China hoped that the chair selected by the Parties would facilitate China's current and future work and not cause unnecessarily negative impact on China's accession to the GPA. China looked forward to working closely with the next chair and hoped that China could join the GPA at an early date, which, in China's view, served the interests of all GPA Parties.

China applied for accession to the GPA in 2007. American procurement expert Jean Heilman Grier recently noted that: "While China has made significant progress in its GPA negotiations, the United States and others have indicated that more will be required to reach an acceptable accession package." The Sixth Revised Offer came in October of 2019.