The long run, a phrase associated with John Maynard Keynes, is not in favour at the moment. In world trade, however, history shows it is the thing that counts.

The founder of modern Singapore, the late Lee Kuan Yew, explained it like this in the 1990s, when China stood on the threshold of globalisation. Admit a nation to the international exchange of goods and services, said Lee, and ‘they can stay within their boundaries and their excess energy and skills and drive are used in producing goods or services or making investments and improving their people’s lot.’

Denied this opportunity, in Lee’s rather Darwinist view, a nation’s urge to grow by force would be strong. He thought of Japan in the 1940s and of modern China, warning that if the West tried to isolate China economically then ‘it must be prepared for a military conflict at some stage’.

That was the argument that persuaded world leaders to bring China into the family of trading nations and to admit it to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001. Today, this is seen by critics as the apex of arrogance by a global caste more at home in Alpine seminars than on the factory floor in Pennsylvania. In their view, appeasement and elite inertia led to the decline of the American working class after China was ushered into the WTO and allowed to steal jobs and destroy industries; the foundation story of President Donald Trump’s movement to Make America Great Again.

The US Vice-President J.D. Vance spoke for many when eulogising the lost towns in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a work whose intellectual firepower makes tariffs and protectionism rational to the average citizen.

The problem with the Vance-Trump analysis is that it is half-true. The false part is that China got into the WTO easily. In fact it was only admitted after years of hard bargaining and bound itself to onerous concessions. The true part is that China then broke the rules with impunity.

As ever, the documents tell the story. In the process of carrying out research for my book on Hong Kong, The Gate to China, I was led to the WTO’s archives in Geneva, which record the Sisyphean progress of the People’s Republic as it sought to enter into the club of trading giants. They are comprehensive and unbiased.

The background evoked by Lee Kuan Yew is worth remembering. In the early 1990s, the rise of China was inescapable. The Pearl River Delta was the world’s largest industrial processing zone. Led by Hong Kong firms, capital and management created a second great migration of Chinese industry to match the exodus of 1949. It could not be ignored.

The official Statistical Yearbook of Guangdong for 1996 recorded that the output of electronic factories had multiplied more than 20-fold in the preceding decade, that of textiles grew by a factor of ten and that of plastics by 20 times. Across multiple industries, Guangdong, the province adjacent to Hong Kong, was witnessing expansion of 40 per cent every 12 months.

John Bond, who later became group chairman of HSBC Holdings, recalled the ‘lightbulb moment’ when Zhu Rongji, an economic reformer, told bankers that China must open up to the world and integrate with the trading system. Bond posed a version of the ‘Needham Question’, devised by the Cambridge polymath Joseph Needham, who asked why imperial China had fallen behind modern Europe in maths, science and technology. ‘How can 22 per cent of the world’s population account for less than four per cent of the world’s GDP?’, the banker said.

The Geneva documents trace Zhu Rongji’s answer. As early as 1986, China had applied to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), set up in 1946 to cut tariffs and reduce barriers to trade. The major trading powers had agreed to transform it into the WTO on 1 January 1995. As China’s central bank governor and then as prime minister, Zhu led the battle to get in.

There are echoes of today in what happened next. Zhu argued with hardline Marxists at home and haggled with China’s counterparts in Geneva. He faced outrage from zealots who published a best-selling nationalist tract, China Can Say No. The talks faltered when China devalued its currency on 1 January 1994, handing a bonus to critics who saw it as a giant emerging predator. A greater blow fell when the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade ‘by mistake’ in 1999. Despite it all, talking and trading survived.

The original ‘restricted’ report of the Geneva working party on accession provides an invaluable companion to the process. The working party met behind closed doors 21 times between March 1996 and 17 September 2001. The final report ran to almost 200 pages.

It shows that China was challenged about its statistics, pressed to open its markets and told to dismantle its system of discrimination against foreign businesses. Zhu’s chief negotiator, Long Yongtu, agreed to abandon bureaucratic barriers to imports. His opponents dissected China’s taxes, business licences and product testing.

They drilled into detail like the profit margins on pharmaceuticals and the inspection regime for boilers. They demanded commitments on intellectual property, copyright protection, patents, trademarks, test data, trade secrets, government procurement, shareholder rights and legal remedies. The talks dragged on for five years after the WTO was set up.

In parallel, China was negotiating directly with the United States. President Bill Clinton chose a sharp lawyer, Charlene Barshefsky, to deal with Beijing. The Americans believed they had let Japan into the GATT and the WTO too easily, for geopolitical reasons. They had no intention of repeating the mistake. As a result the talks were fraught, requiring direct contact between Clinton and the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, to break the deadlock.

Eventually, Barshefsky flew to Beijing to seal the deal in a cliffhanger replete with espionage, walkouts and dissimulation. Tellingly, the chief Chinese negotiator, Long, later disclosed that his country’s biggest problem was a fierce anti-dumping clause. But at a midnight meeting of China’s State Council, Premier Zhu signed off on all the concessions.

China entered the WTO on 11 December 2001. The agreement imposed harder conditions on the People’s Republic than on any other applicant. The text ran to 1,500 pages and weighed 13 kilograms. At the time China’s trade was worth $500 billion, said Long, looking back ten years later. By then, in 2011, it had doubled. Within that first decade of WTO membership, it became the world’s largest exporter and the country with the greatest foreign exchange reserves.

The establishment case for China’s accession was put by Nicholas Lardy, then of the Brookings Institution, in testimony to the US-China Security Review Commission in 2001. ‘The United States has a substantial stake in China’s further economic reforms and its deepening integration in the global economy’, Lardy said, adding: ‘most obviously, it serves US economic interests’.

What a difference a quarter of a century makes. It is profitless to scrutinise every aspect of the Vance-Trump theology, but few would dispute that China broke faith and nobody has summed up the disillusion better than Bill Clinton’s negotiator, Charlene Barshefsky. Speaking in a Brookings Institution podcast in 2019, she admitted that no American president had stood up to China as it turned back to hardline state control of the economy under President Hu Jintao and his successor, Xi Jinping.

Barshefsky said that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump had all failed to use the hard-won enforcement mechanisms built into the WTO agreement to push back. Emollient advisers in the White House, hungry executives and delusional deal-makers all figure in today’s blame game, depending on who is doing the blaming.

‘These were tremendous opportunities… which the US did not take.’ Barshefsky said. Instead the US opted for a series of ‘strategic dialogues with China’, that she dismissed as ‘talk fests’, and which became a way for China to manage the United States.

‘Opportunity lost’, she concluded.