Trade policy openness — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, FTAs, industrial protection.
Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.
Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Completion of 15-year multilateral-negotiation process. China agreed to extensive tariff reductions (average industrial tariff ~15% pre-accession to ~9% by 2008), market-access liberalisation (telecommunications, banking, insurance), trading-rights reform, and binding commitments on transparency + national treatment. In return, WTO members committed to most-favoured-nation treatment. Facilitated the 'China Shock' to US and European manufacturing employment (Autor-Dorn-Hanson 2013) but accelerated global supply- chain integration and Chinese GDP growth to >10% annualised through 2008. Seminal trade-policy event of the 21st century.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.