Quoting the chairman of the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC), Ma Yongwei, China Daily Business Weekly said more licences would be granted to foreign insurance companies in the future.Opening up is on the CIRC agenda as negotiations for China to join the WTO continue, Ma said.

Opening up is an inevitable trend, he said adding "we will not wait until domestic companies have fully prepared themselves. " Foreign institutions will be admitted at an appropriate time to create pressure on home companies to increase their awareness of self-improvement."

The top circ officials comments coincides with the visit of u s commerce secretary william daley, who is here to lobby for more market access for american goods and services into china.

Daley is the last seniorclinton administration official to visit china before chinese premier Zhu Rongji embarks on his first official visit to washington early next month.During Zhu's trip, Beijing and Washington are expected to announce a package deal to facilitate china's entry into the wto, ending its 13-year-long bid to join the multilateral trade body. The United States has been insisting on a commercially viable deal with china and the insurance sector is one of the several sectors that China will need to open further if it hopes to join the wto. However, the CIRC official made it clear that China will not allow easy access for all foreign insurance companies to its insurance market, expected to be worth 250 billion yuan (30 billion u s dollars) in premium by 2000.

He noted that China's insurance industry was still immature and lacked a strong legal basis.Liberalisation will create immense pressure on the national insurance industry, he said adding "we cannot allow foreign companies, as they want to flood ourunsophisticated market without limit.

" The official newspaper noted China's insurance industry has witnessed rapid growth with the 199 billion yuan (24 billion u s dollars) sector reporting an average growth rate of 37.6 per cent per annum since 1980. With improving international communications and cooperation, a crude form of a competitive market dominated by state-owned commercial firms has come into existence, the paper commented.