China and US hurl accusations of hypocrisy at each other as trade-war litigation begins at WTO
- US ambassador Dennis Shea says China is using the World Trade Organisation to pursue ‘non-market’ policies
- China’s representative says the US ‘reeks of hypocrisy’ on trade
The United States and China clashed on Wednesday at a World Trade Organisation meeting with a US envoy accusing Beijing of using the WTO to pursue “non-market” policies and a Chinese official saying it was Washington that was flouting the rule book.
US President Donald Trump has outraged US trading partners by erecting a tariff wall against imports of steel and aluminium – justified by US national security concerns – and has hit Chinese goods with huge tariffs over accusations of stealing US intellectual property.
At the meeting on Wednesday, where a slew of legal disputes over Trump’s trade policies entered a formal adjudication phase, US ambassador Dennis Shea said China was using the WTO to promote “non-market” policies, which had distorted world markets and led to massive excess capacity, especially in steel and aluminium.
The United States cannot abide this level of hypocrisy [by China]
An unidentified Chinese official retorted that Beijing did not want to get into a blame game and said the United States had failed to back up its “unfounded” claims about China’s economy, which it was using to disguise its own violations of the WTO rule book.
Both sides accused each other of hypocrisy.
Shea said the WTO should throw out a lawsuit brought by China, along with those brought by the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Russia and Turkey, because WTO rules allowed exceptions for actions taken for national security concerns.
“Some (WTO) members have expressed concerns that invoking the national security exception in these circumstances would undermine the international trading system. This is erroneous, and completely backwards,” Shea said, according to a copy of his remarks provided to Reuters.