Why granting MES to China was a huge deal?

China's future trading power relied on three words- Market, Economy, Status. Certain rules governing how countries treated China in trade were set to expire at the end of 2016. Chinese believe its trading partners should acknowledge it as a market economy in latter years whereas others do not agree with the interpretation. Market economy means the cost of production and prices are set by supply and demand which is quite averse to the planned economy where a central government sets everything such as costs, prices, wages, outputs, quotes, et cetera.

The rest of the countries had worried that Chinese companies would unfairly compete with their companies when World Trade Organization (WTO) considered for membership with China because Chinese Communist party had an extreme influence on the cost of production and prices for Chinese products. Also, China would have more easily dumped products in the US and other countries if confirmed the relation with WTO.

In 2011, consequently, WTO offered trade agreement with China under certain conditions that other members of WTO could treat it as the non-market economy and apply anti-dumping tariffs on artificially cheap Chinese goods mainly such as steel, et cetera.

If China would have gained Market Economy Status (MES), European Union (EU) would have required to change the way it measured China prices. In 2015, China was the EU's second-largest trading partner after the United States with a trading volume of $570 billion.

Numerous debates that took place for the past months whether or not China should be granted MES by the EU. According to US citizens, enabling MES for China would have made it more incompetent because the country had already been unfairly dumping products around the globe since many years. Hence, US citizens were demanding for ‘a fair deal or no deal'. The political decision which shall be made by US and EU on December 11, 2016, shall define milestones for the future of global trade of China.