US trade rules called punitive toward China

Just as top US commerce and trade officials announced they would host their Chinese counterparts for an important annual talk in December, a US trade analyst claimed that US authorities have been using their most punitive and abusive practices against goods from China.

Bill Watson, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, said the US sets anti-dumping duties against Chinese goods using what is called nonmarket economy (NME) methodology. The practice gives license to the US Department of Commerce to ignore Chinese producers' cost and price data and to turn, instead, to estimates for those data that are usually punitive and almost unrealistic.

"Without the legal discipline of the World Trade Organization's Antidumping Agreement, NME antidumping practice has been able to develop in a state of lawlessness," Watson said in an article published on Cato's website on Tuesday.