It does of course slightly stick in the craw to be saying that China is actually correct about these current US and Trump trade disputes but it is also true that they're right. The entire point of having something like the World Trade Organisation, with its varied rules, is so that disputes get dealt with through the WTO, using the WTO rules. That's the whole point and purpose of the institution, the organisation and the rules.
There is also a deeper point here, which is that those who set up the WTO know very well that it's easy enough for the exigencies of domestic politics to influence, in a harmful manner, the rules surrounding international trade. This is well known in fact, it's a result of the concentrated benefit of restricting imports going to those few manufacturers who can raise their prices as a result, the pain and costs being spread over all consumers, a very disparate interest. And in politics the concentrated interest near always wins. Thus, another point of the WTO system is to insulate trade, and the consumer interest, from the special interests in domestic politics.
Thus we really should be saying that China is right here:
The United States should resort to rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), not unilateral trade tools such as Section 301, to resolve trade disputes with China, a former White House economist has said.
The China part there being that it's a Chinese newspaper doing the quoting.
All these tools have a common feature: they were meant for the pre-WTO era. Section 301 and Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, and Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 were all put in place during the Cold War era, and were rarely used since the launch of World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.
Quite so, the WTO is really to replace all of those rules. One of the points being, as I say, to insulate trade policy from whoever can get a shouting match going in domestic politics. Or, say, a populist President trying to shore up his base.
Even as he seeks Beijing's help on North Korea, President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order asking his trade office to consider investigating China for the alleged theft of American technology and intellectual property, an administration official said Saturday.
That step is expected Monday but won't come as a surprise to the Beijing government. There is no deadline for deciding if any investigation is necessary. Such an investigation easily could last a year.
It's only going to get worse too for we know very well that such an investigation isn't going to be about whether China has broken WTO rules now, don't we?
The entire point of being in the WTO, of admitting China, was so that we had the one legal and dispute resolution system to govern international trade. Now we're all in we should be using it, not unilateral applications of domestic law, as Trump is suggesting.
