Barack Obama’s decision last week to impose emergency tariffs on Chinese tyres has fuelled an increasingly familiar Sino- US war of words over trade.
Beijing launched an investigation yesterday into whether US poultry and car parts were being unfairly dumped in the Chinese market. It also requested formal consultations at the World Trade Organisation into the US tariffs – the first step in trying to have them declared illegal.
Whether it will succeed is unclear. The particular “safeguard” measure that the US president invoked was, after all, written specifically to allow the US to block Chinese imports as part of the price for China joining the WTO in 2001.