IT was the summit the world wrote off in advance. Japan's Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa was a political lame duck, and few of his Group of Seven counterparts were in much better positions domestically. Almost every commentator (including this newspaper) assumed the meeting would fail to significant progress towards completion of the seven-year-old Uruguay Round negotiations and would do no more than repeat the empty promises of previous years to finalise the revised General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as soon as possible.
Instead, four big trading powers - the United States, Japan, the European Community and Canada - clinched a deal to lower or eliminate tariffs in 18 manufacturing sectors, and loosened the logjam blocking a new GATT accord.
To Hongkong, as to any free-trading community, the decision is welcome. It is not only the big four's domestic economies which stand to gain hundreds of thousands of jobs over the next decade as a result of the deal but also the manufacturing and exporting economies of the developing world.
If, as is hoped, the deal leads the way to a full settlement of the GATT by the end of the year, it will deal a body blow to protectionists in Europe and the United States determined to keep out the manufactures of the Asian region. It also will spike the guns of America's managed traders, who would sideline the GATT as an excuse to divide and rule among exporting countries through bilateral deals.
The agreement will take some of the urgency out of the planned Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit, from which China wishes to exclude Hongkong and Taiwan, the two powerhouses of its economic resurgence. Hongkong has a stronger voice - and agreater value to Beijing - in the GATT, from which China is still excluded.
The battle for the GATT, however, is far from over. Developing countries may still try to block the industrialised countries' ''zero for zero'' tariff deal if they attempt to push it through worldwide. Peter Sutherland, the new GATT Director-General, whowelcomed the deal as a signal to relaunch the rest of the multilateral negotiations, knows from his EC experience just how hard it will be to sort out the remaining differences on agricultural subsidies, government procurement programmes and market access.