The stages of reforms under the influence of requirements of the World Trade Organization are considered on the basis of an analysis of Chinese legislation. Four stages of preparation by the People’s Republic of China for accession to the WTO within which there was a transformation of the legal system of China from 1982 to 2001 are described. The sources of Chinese lawmaking are presented and systematized as the basis of the economic legislation of the PRC at the stage of preparation for inclusion of China in the WTO. Attention is drawn to the particularities of the power organization of the Chinese state, in which there is no separation of powers into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. This, in turn, allows to mark the feature in the economic sphere of legal regulation in China connected with the existence of the rules established by the Supreme National Court as a source of law. To represent the dynamics of normativelegal regulation of foreign trade activities, China has used the system of dialectical and universal methods of knowledge; general scientific methods (induction and deduction) and techniques (analysis and synthesis); as well as a special method – formally-legal. The identified course and direction of changes in legal support of domestic and foreign economic processes in China suggests the possibility to consider the experience of China in the promotion of Russia in the international trading community.The authors propose that the entry of China into the WTO is of interest to the BRICS countries as long as China achieves optimal utilization of the WTO’s external economic opportunities. In addition, China has established a legally solid basis for the development of market relations in the state.