Introduction The growth of China’s manufacturing strength and the emergence of the country as a major player in the global trading system have resulted in more trade disputes directed against Chinese manufacturers. In the area of antidumping (AD), China has become a leading target of AD investigations, accounting for 35 percent of all new AD investigations initiated and 41 percent of new AD measures applied in 2008. Between 2007 and 2008, global AD investigations against China increased by 27 percent, from 52 new investigations targeted at Chinese exports in 2007 to 66 new investigations in 2008 (Bown 2009b). Importantly, developing countries have emerged as frequent users of antidumping against Chinese products. In 2008, for example, developing countries figured prominently on the list of top ten AD initiation countries against China, which included the European Union, Thailand, and Indonesia (11 each), Malaysia (ten), Taiwan (nine), South Korea (eight), India (seven), the United States (six), Brazil, and Japan (four each). While the economics literature has provided rather thorough documentation of the spread of antidumping enforcement throughout the world (e.g., Feinberg and Reynolds 2007; Prusa 2001) and has also increasingly focused on the determinants of antidumping use in developing countries (e.g., Bown and Tovar 2009; Moore and Zanardi 2009), few studies have examined the political and economic factors that shape developing countries’ AD actions against China. However, the new activism of less developed countries (LDCs) in the dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization (WTO)1 and China’s growing ability to influence global trade patterns and the economic welfare of LDCs make it imperative for us to develop a better understanding of how developing countries leverage the AD instrument to gain competitive advantage in the world market. Consequently this chapter undertakes such an analysis and addresses the following questions: What helps to explain the initiation of AD petitions by developing countries against China? What explains the outcome of initiated cases? In other words, why did some AD cases result in affirmative dumping and injury rulings, while others did not? This chapter draws on the literature on the political economy of AD decision making to examine the factors that influence the use of the AD instrument by the

following ten developing countries against China: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Peru, Turkey, Venezuela, and South Africa. While the choice of these ten countries is dictated in large part by data availability, it can also be justified by the fact that these countries are the main “new users” of the AD instrument in the developing world, accounting for more than 40 percent of new investigations and 45 percent of all new measures imposed by WTO Members during the first ten years of the organization’s history (Bown 2008). The findings of this research suggest that industry-level factors such as import competition from China are important determinants of the pattern of LDCs’ AD initiations against China. Macroeconomic factors such as GDP growth rate also affect the probability of LDC AD determination in a way that is generally consistent with standard economic theory. Importantly, the empirical analysis presented below did not yield any evidence suggesting that China’ membership in the WTO has constrained developing countries from aggressively pursuing the AD instrument. In the following analyses of the pattern of AD initiation and adjudication, the WTO variable is mostly positively signed and has even achieved statistical significance in some of the model specifications. I conjecture that this pattern may be explained by China’s Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) status under the WTO, the designation of China as a non-market economy in AD investigations for 15 years upon succession, and the retaliatory incentives arising from the growing deflection of Chinese exports to developing country market(s). These factors may have overwhelmed any constraining effect that the WTO institution itself may have exerted on the use of antidumping by developing countries. The chapter first lays out the factors that could potentially affect the pattern of AD decision making by developing countries. After proceeding to provide some descriptive statistics on the use of the AD instrument by developing countries, the chapter then engages in a preliminary test of its main hypotheses. This empirical test draws on industry-level data on AD investigations and outcomes of main AD user countries from the Global Antidumping Database (Bown 2010)2 as well as industry-level trade and production data from the World Bank’s Trade, Production, and Protection Database. Since industry-level trade and production data is only available through 2004, statistical analyses which incorporated industry-level variables are limited to the years between 1992 and 2005 (with lagged 2004 data). While the lack of longer time-series data at the industry level renders the analysis somewhat preliminary, the findings presented below should nevertheless provide some tentative insights into the impact of the WTO on developing countries’ use of the AD statute against China.