The Study Of WTO Safeguard Measures And The Countermeasures Of China

Safeguard measures system is an important exception system of the WTO; it is the "relief valve" of international trade. This system regulates, when the absolute or relative import quantity of some products increases largely, and it has injured or threatens to injure seriously the domestic industries of the importing countries, the importing countries can adopt significant import restrictions in order to remedy or prevent serious injury. This regulation embodies the principle of fairness of the world trade organization.After China’s entry into the WTO, we enjoyed more trade freedom. In addition, the price of our country’s product is low, so we can see our products all over the world. Our country has becomes the biggest exporting country of the world. This has largely pushed the development of our national economy, but at the same time, other countries import so many products from China that their own producers’interests are threaten, and causing the relevant industry workers unemployed. Therefore, in order to protect the relevant domestic producers and workers interests, many countries begin to initiate trade remedy investigation to the products from China, for example, the safeguards investigation.And now the influence of the global economic crisis has not faded, each country tries to recovery its economy. With the intention of developing economy and increasing employment, in the future, our country will suffer more safeguards investigation. Therefore, it is necessary to research the general theory of safeguard measures, the situation that our country suffered about safeguards investigation and the reason for that situation, especially the measures that we should take to deal with the safeguards investigation.Based on the above background, this paper use "WTO safeguards measures and the countermeasure of China" as the topic, basically adopt qualitative analysis method, to analyze five parts.The first part is introduction, mainly including the background of the topic selection and the meaning of the topic, the literature review and the main content of this paper.The second part is the summary of safeguard measures system. This part mainly analyzes the safeguard measures system of the WTO system. The main content include system structure, the characteristics of safeguard measures and the historical origin of safeguard measures, as well as the implementation conditions and implementation procedure. In this part,I lay emphasis on the implementation condition of the safeguard measures."Agreement on Safeguards" stipulates three important implementation elements. But it fails to clearly define the three elements, such as how to determine the import growth, how to determine serious injury or serious injury threat, and the causal relation between import growth and serious injury or serious injury threat, etc. Thus, there exists a lot of controversy in the practical application process. Accordingly, based on the "Agreement on Safeguards", in combination with the judgment report of the panel and appeal group, this part analyzes in detail the implementation of the safeguard measures in order to offer reference for our country in the future.The third part analyzes the present situation of the implementation of the safeguard measures and characteristics of the implementation in five aspects.The fourth part analyzes the safeguard disputes that our country suffered. Firstly, I have analyzed the situation that our country currently suffered from the safeguards investigation, and then analyzed the reasons of this phenomenon. Later on, with the analysis of the two specific cases that our country suffered, I summarized the redeeming feature that we have in dealing with the two cases, as well as the lessons that we should draw from. Finally I summed up the experience of the America and other member states in dealing with the safeguards disputes.According to the analysis of the fourth part, we can draw that there exists many disadvantages that we had in dealing with the safeguard measures. So, the fifth part summarized and analyzed the existing problems and put forward the corresponding count ermeasures.In Post Crisis Era, the global economy faces bigger challenges, every country tends to take trade protection measures to resurrect its national economy. As the world’s largest trading nation, the export of our country will face greater obstacles, there will be more investigations aimed at the products of our country. In this case,it is of great significance both in theory and practice to study and analysis safeguard measures.