Politics & Power Quote by William M. Daley

Daley’s sentence is a velvet-rope pitch with a tripwire hidden under the carpet. He opens by treating access to “a market of a billion people” as self-evident gospel, the kind of scale-based promise that turns trade policy into an almost natural force: of course American firms will benefit, because numbers that large are meant to quiet dissent. The phrasing “no question” does political work here, pre-bunking labor and human-rights objections by framing them as naïve compared to the hard arithmetic of exports and growth.

Then he pivots, and the mood shifts from sales brochure to probation notice. “This will test China and the world trade system” is a warning dressed up as neutrality. Daley is threading a needle familiar to U.S. centrists of the era: sell engagement to business constituencies while signaling to skeptics that America isn’t walking in blind. The subtext is enforcement. China is being invited in, but also put on notice that the rules will be monitored; the “world trade system” is presented as an impartial referee, even though the U.S. helped write the rules and retains leverage through dispute mechanisms and market access.

The context is the late-1990s/early-2000s push to integrate China more deeply into global capitalism (a pathway that culminated in WTO entry). Daley’s line captures the bargain and the bet: economic opportunity now, institutional discipline later. It’s optimistic about markets, cautious about compliance, and quietly anxious about what happens if the test reveals that the system can’t actually compel a rising power to play by the script.