Recognition Of Article XX, GATT:from The Perspective Of CHINA-RARE EARTH2014

China has been regarded as a monopolist in the international rare earth market for years. Since last century, the Chinese government has restricted the rare earth materials’ export by export quotas, export duties and the other measures which aroused the strong dissatisfaction from the bigget rare earth import countries including the US, the EU, and Japan. In2012, the US, the EU and Japan officially summited their pleading to the WTO against China. The WTO made the final decision on August,2014verdicting that China’s measures on rare earth violate the obligations under GATT and the Protocol of Accession. In another word, China lost her case of China-rare earth2014.This result aroused another new debate from both the Chinese and the foreign scholars. The foreign scholars put their attentions on the legality, the reasonality and the subjects of the export restictions toward rare earth material. On the other hand, the Chinese scholars are more interested in the perspectives like the reasons of the failure or the future decisions of the Chinese government. As it is without any doubt that to promote the liberalization in the international trade is the most important purpose of the WTO, anyone who attempt to legitimate their restrictive measures on the free trade have to satisfy various requirments. In China-rare earth2014, China invoked Article XX, GATT as the defence of her measures of restricting the export of rare earth materail. Whether China is qualified to invoke the exception article is the essential issue of China-rare earth2014. To invoke Article XX of GATT as a defence, there are three thresholds that the WTO required in the relevant annoucements. Since the foundation of WTO, there are39cases that the defendents invoked Article XX as denfence for the measures at issue. However, only one case of the39succeeded.97%cases lost which China-rare earth in one of them. As external trade of China’s growing, China-rare earth will not be a termination but a start. There will be more cases that China has to invoke Article XX of GATT as defence in the future. How in improve the application and the capability of invoking Article XX, GATT is indeed an important issue for the Chinese government and the scholars.