Letting China into the WTO was not the key decision

We study China’s export growth to the United States from 1950–2008, using a structural model to disentangle the effects of past tariff changes from the effects of changes in expectations of future tariffs. We find that the effects of China’s 1980 Normal Trade Relations (NTR) grant lasted past its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the likelihood of losing NTR status decreased significantly during 1986–92 but changed little thereafter. US manufacturing employment trends support our findings: industries more exposed to the 1980 reform have shed workers steadily since then without acceleration around China’s WTO accession.

That is from a new and forthcoming JPE article by George Alessandria, Shafaat Yar Khan, Armen Khederlarian, Kim J. Ruhl, and Joseph B. Steinberg.