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US Files WTO Case Against China. Tell Us Something We Don't Know.

By Dan Harris and Steve Dickinson

The United States has hit China with a WTO case, contending China has been subsidizing its exporters, particularly its largest and best known companies. The US government is alleging that China's central government, provinces and cities have all been paying subsidizing many Chinese companies that export. As my kids would say, well duh!. Since this has been going on since forever and since everyone knows it, the real question is why has the US brought this lawsuit now? I do not know. In fact, if anything, the timing seems very strange. First off, it would have been good politics to have brought it before the recent elections, but that was not done. Second, if the US wins and China has to stop subsidizing its exporters (or push those subsidies a bit further underground), this will mean higher prices for buyers in the US and elsewhere. Of course, these higher prices will also been US companies will be better able to compete with Chinese companies on the world market and that, no doubt is why this case has been brought. Click a href="http://www.ustr.gov/assets/Document_Library/Fact_Sheets/2008/asset_upload_file457_15251.pdf"here/a for the Office of the United States Trade Representatives "Fact Sheet" on this lawsuit [h/t to Laurel Delany of a href="http://borderbuster.blogspot.com/"The Global Small Business Blog/a, who alerted me by email to this filing] div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ChinaLawBlog?a=Bc4pO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ChinaLawBlog?i=Bc4pO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ChinaLawBlog?a=K7jzO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/ChinaLawBlog?i=K7jzO" border="0"/img/a /div

Full post as published by China Law Blog on December 19, 2008 (boomark / email).