Chapter 4 explains the anti-dumping investigation procedures of the US and EU and their differences. China represents a special case for other members with its socialist market economy and growing impact in the global political arena. Within the scope of this research, China needs to be evaluated in detail as (1) nearly one-quarter of all anti-dumping measures were taken against China, (2) Chinese exporters complain about the anti-dumping investigations both at the domestic level and the WTO DSM, (3) the attitude towards Chinese exporters eventually turns into general policies applicable to the other WTO members as the ADA is silent on some procedural issues. Thus, Chapter 4 describes the anti-dumping procedures of the US and EU and the position of China. These different procedural rules form a connection with the notion of hidden trade protectionism and anti-dumping.

The conclusion that China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was a failure from a US perspective stems from: 1) loading too many issues and expectations—including an entire panoply of national security and geostrategic concerns—on to the WTO and its trade-rules-based, binding dispute settlement system to address; 2) failure by the United States and the rest of the world to use the tools available as a result of China’s accession to the WTO to both protect their domestic markets and hold China to account for its WTO commitments; and 3) China’s U-turn away from market-economy reforms to a much more state-centric, Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-run the economy. Addressing the United States’ concerns with China will require working to strengthen the WTO and then using it to take on a more limited set of trade concerns while using other tools to address broader concerns over China, both bilaterally and in conjunction with allies and partners.

Chapter 4 explores the utility of different WTO rules in disciplining market-distortive behaviour of SOEs and subsidies, including GATT rules on import monopolies, state trading enterprises (STEs), transparency, and anti-dumping (AD) measures. In our view, these rules are all of limited utilities, albeit for different reasons: the rules on import monopolies and STEs are quite narrow in terms of the coverage of policy instruments and the prescribed obligations, the transparency obligation is rather tooth-less, while the ability to use AD measures to deal with market distortions due to state intervention has been curtailed by the Appellate Body (AB) in recent cases.

Chapter 1 introduces the main theme of the book, that is, challenging the conventional wisdom that the existing WTO rules are inadequate to address China’s state capitalism and demonstrating that China’s WTO-plus obligations, coupled with the general rules on subsidies, do provide ways to address the problem. It also provides summaries of the chapters to explain the structure of the arguments in the book.

All interested parties in an anti-dumping investigation shall be given notice of the information which the authorities require and ample opportunity to present in writing all evidence which they consider relevant in respect of the investigation in question.

The decision whether or not to impose an anti-dumping duty in cases where all requirements for the imposition have been fulfilled, and the decision whether the amount of the anti-dumping duty to be imposed shall be the full margin of dumping or less, are decisions to be made by the authorities of the importing Member. It is desirable that the imposition be permissive in the territory of all Members, and that the duty be less than the margin if such lesser duty would be adequate to remove the injury to the domestic industry.