China has always kept its promises and fulfilled its commitments to the World Trade Organization (WTO) since its accession to the organization, Chinese foreign trade minister Shi Guangsheng said in Suzhou at a national exports conference on Saturday.

Referring to some foreign media's reporting which accused Chinaof not working hard enough to carry out its WTO commitments, Shi said: "that was not true."

He said that China had strictly fulfilled its commitments to WTO since it formally entered the organization last December.

The Chinese government had finished cleaning up its 2,300 sets of WTO-related laws and regulations, of which 830 were abolished and 325 were amended. New laws had been issued introducing WTO rules.

China had cut its average tariff level to 12 percent with tariffs reduced on 5,332 items since the beginning of this year, Shi said.

A number of foreign insurance and financial companies had also entered China as the government opened the domestic market in accordance with the timetable.

The China-WTO Notification Enquiry Center started operating on January 14 this year and so far had received 350 inquiries and sent more than 200 notices about China's trade policy to the WTO.

Shi noted that as a new member of the WTO, China had played a constructive role in the new round of multilateral trade talks.

Referring to the incident that import quotas for some products were announced later than expected by accident, Shi said that it was due to the limited preparation time and would not happen again.

July 21, 2002