China to probe auto, chicken products from US

• Source: Global Times
• [08:12 September 14 2009]
• Comments

By Qiu Wei

The Ministry of Commerce moved quickly Sunday to announce that it would launch anti-dumping and anti-subsidies investigations into some automobile and chicken products imported from the United States, a reaction to Washington's decision Friday to drastically tax Chinese-made tires.

"The probe follows complaints by Chinese manufacturers," the ministry said on its website. "They alleged that the above products entered the country's markets in an unfair competition manner, which harmed domestic industries."

It did not specify what automobile and chicken products could be blacklisted.

In a rare move, the Foreign Ministry followed the decision promptly yesterday by saying that the US decision is "grave trade protectionism" and goes against its commitments made at the Group of 20 summit.

"We hereby express our strong discontent and firm opposition to the US decision, which was made regardless of China's solemn stance," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said in a statement.

The renewed trade row between China and the US over tires may cast a shadow over a Group of 20 summit scheduled for September 24-25 in Pittsburgh, where US President Barack Obama will host his counterpart, Hu Jintao, and other leaders from major powers. The tariff will be put into place the following day.

Zhou Shijian, a senior researcher of Sino-US relations at Tsinghua University, said Beijing's retaliatory step covers $2 billion worth of automobile and chicken-product imports.

The US placed tariffs on $1.8 billion worth of tire imports from China, Bloomberg reported over the weekend.

Of the 11 Chinese international-trade specialists contacted by the Global Times, 10 said the Ministry of Commerce's retaliatory step was legitimate.

War of words

"It was a misuse of the special safeguard measures and sent a wrong signal to the world," Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming said Saturday in a statement on the ministry's website. "Not only does it violate WTO rules, it contravenes commitments that the US government made at the G20 financial summit."

There exists no direct competition between China's tire products and the US-made ones, as China's tires mainly go to the US maintenance market, the statement said.

Earlier on the same day, the White House insisted that the additional duties were "meant to enforce trade rules and not spark a trade war" with one of its biggest trading partners.

This is simply about enforcing the rules of the road and creating a trade system that is based on those rules and is fair for everybody," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.

Shen Weijia, executive director of Giti Tire, China's largest tire producer, warned that the US decision is an apparent form of trade protectionism, and it would not hurt Chinese manufacturers too much.