If the World Trade Organization is to be reformed, one principle needs to be maintained: The multilateral trade regime must be protected and the role it plays in facilitating global free trade should never be undermined, a China Daily editorial said.

Rather than being made a tool of any country, the WTO needs to make its rules fair. It is obviously unfair for some developed countries to subsidize their agriculture, the practice of which has long distorted the global trade in agricultural products in favor of these countries. In anti-dumping investigations, the third country as substitute is also unfair and has seriously distorted the order of world trade.

China maintains that the WTO rules need to make sure that the developing countries get the special and differentiated treatment they deserve for their development. The proposals also say that the reform should require some WTO members to scrap their discriminative investigations against imports and investment in the name of national security.

Maintaining fair play is what the WTO is supposed to do. If any reform is meant to turn the world body into a tool to contain the development of a particular country or facilitate the trade of a particular country at the cost of other countries, such reform will go nowhere, the editorial said.