Learn from anti-dumping games
胡国栋
【关键词】anti-dumping
【全文】
It has been a year since China accessed into World Trade Organization (WTO). Over the past year, China as a WTO member has fulfilled its commitments with a sense of responsibility. However, China is still with more great care to exercise its rights under WTO rules, for example, one of which is the antidumping action. According to WTO agreement, if a company exports a product at a price lower than the price it normally charges on its own home market, it is said to be “dumping” the product. Many governments take action against dumping in order to defend their domestic industries, which is one of the games that are allowed by WTO. In essence, antidumping makes the main trade remedy instrument, just as countervailing and safeguarding measures, which is described as the red light on the free trade road WTO persists in, to prevent members from the short-term pain out of control caused by reducing tariffs and scraping trade barriers before they get the long-term gain WTO free trade policy promises.
It goes without saying that the old WTO members, in particular the developed countries, are more familiar with this antidumping game. For instance, Canada and United States stipulated their antidumping laws a century ago. In stark contrast, China just began to join this game 5 years ago, when it initiated the first antidumping investigation in 1997. So the shortness of experience in international economical game rules and the largeness of Chinese export products unavoidably cause China to be the sitting duck and the biggest loser in the antidumping game so far. From the first case against China initiated by EC in 1979, there have been more than 500 antidumping cases targeted on China, which affected about 16 billion dollars of Chinese export products and included approximate 4,000 kinds of Chinese merchandises. On the other hand, the number of cases initiated by Chinese investigation agency, Bureau of Fair Trade for Imports and Exports in Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, is only 21 since 1997.
