ABSTRACT
The emergence of China as a major global trade and manufacturing center has resulted in growing trade confrontation between that nation and advanced industrial states in recent years. Not only have Chinese firms been subject to a large number of antidumping actions from abroad, but Beijing has also increasingly had to respond to trade challenges from its old and new rivals alike over an expanding array of trade issues.1 While bilateral negotiation approaches remain a policy option for Beijing, China is increasingly turning to other legal trade remedies, such as antidumping duties, safeguard measures and the dispute settlement procedures of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to address its trade grievances. If, in the past, China has primarily pursued a diplomacy-negotiation-oriented approach to dispute resolution, responding unilaterally to foreign demand for trade liberalization,2 it is now increasingly able to resort to its own domestic legal trade remedy laws and the rules of the WTO to settle trade disputes. Indeed, China’s use of fair trade laws is starting to resemble their use by other major users of these tools. The growing frequency with which Beijing utilizes legal trade remedies therefore represents an important departure from China’s traditional reliance on the diplomatic route to trade dispute resolution and promises to have a major impact on China’s interactions with its trading partners.
