Fighting Protectionism? EU Sees PRC Dumping

Just to illustrate the difficulties in turning rhetoric into action, here's a case of the EU officially placing anti-dumping duties on Chinese wares while world leaders were vowing to fight protectionism at the G-20. From Chinese official broadcaster CCTV:

The European Union on Thursday decided to impose a five-year official anti-dumping duty on seamless steel pipes and aluminum foil from China. The tax rates are 39.2 percent and 30 percent, respectively.

The Ministry of Commerce has been opposed to the new tarrifs since April, when the EU publicized its intent to impose a provisional anti-dumping duty on Chinese seamless steel pipes. The official anti-dumping fees will be implemented by October 8th.

There's also an accompanying video clip. The FT claims this episode is novel as the EU imposed these duties in the absence of demonstrable damage done to European producers:

The European Union on Friday imposed anti-dumping duties of nearly 40 per cent on imports of steel pipe from China. The decision, which followed a preliminary ruling earlier in the year, broke ground by imposing tariffs based only on the threat of damage to European groups from low-priced imports rather than requiring them to show actual lost sales.

Georg Berrisch of Covington & Burling, the law firm that represented the European steel pipe producers, said: “The case shows that industries must not necessarily wait for injury to occur ... to take measures against an onslaught of dumped Chinese imports.”

This action is very much in line with China complaining about the plethora of anti-dumping cases the EU has initiated against China. While US-China trade squabbles attract the lion's share of attention in the rather Amerocentric blogosphere, don't assume that Sino-European trade relations are necessarily better.