China-Australia relations: ‘long list of claims’ may follow Beijing’s unprecedented WTO complaint
- That China has chosen to dispute Australia’s duties imposed years ago suggests a politically motivated ‘tit-for-tat’ response, economic expert says
- World Trade Organization disputes take years to resolve, and many affected firms are better off ‘just eating the losses and moving on’, law professor says
China’s decision to lodge a complaint against Australia’s anti-dumping duties at the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a shift from Beijing’s “usual strategy” – a sign that the move is likely to be politically motivated, according to international trade lawyers.
Although Australia initiated 85 anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases against China between 1995 and 2020, China had not contested any of those cases involving its goods, including the three named in China’s complaint lodged with the WTO on Thursday.
Until now.
This week, China complained to the global trade body about duties that Australia imposed years ago on Chinese railway wheels, wind towers and stainless steel sink products. Beijing is saying that the imposition of duties – ranging from 10 to 30 per cent – on these three products has distorted trade and undermined the WTO’s trading rules.
In the past, China had instead chosen to focus on disputing anti-dumping duties imposed by larger economies such as the United States and the European Union, said Weihuan Zhou, an international economic lawyer at the University of New South Wales Law’s Herbert Smith Freehills CIBEL Centre.