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A long wait for the door to open

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How fitting it is that in the last days of the first treaty port, Macau, China should be able to announce that it is about to enter the World Trade Organisation.

With China's interior about to be thrown completely open to investment and trade, the days of both the treaty ports and their latter-day equivalents, the special economic zones, will be phased out.

That the United States should have played such a vital role is also no coincidence, as it was the Americans who, a century ago, were the first to push for an open- door policy for China to allow all foreign countries equal access to the China market.

Christopher Columbus had, after all, only discovered America on a trade mission to reach China and it was a Portuguese expedition which first established a trading base in China more than 400 years ago.

As the European powers scrambled to gain a foothold, the Emperor Qianlong famously rebuffed Lord Macartney's mission in 1793, saying China had no need for Britain's manufacturers nor its ingenious articles.

Hong Kong's first governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, promised after the First Opium War, that he had opened up a whole new world to trade, so vast 'that all the mills of Lancashire could not make stocking-stuff sufficient for one of its provinces'. The dream is still strong although now it seems that just one of China's provinces can make enough textiles to clothe all of both England and America.

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