Beijing, 11 Jun (Xinhua) - The US Department of Commerce announced its final ruling on antidumping and countervailing duty investigations into imports of standard steel pipes from China on 30 May. Its finding was that the Chinese enterprises concerned benefited from government subsidies at rates ranging from 29.57 per cent to 615.92 per cent. The news spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce said a few days ago that China was strongly dissatisfied with and firmly opposed to the US Department of Commerce for upholding its preliminary ruling that the countervailing duty law applied to China and for continuing to use some of the wrong methods used in the preliminary ruling in its final determination.

The Ministry of Commerce reiterated that the United States adopted a policy of not applying the countervailing duty law to "non- market economy countries" in 1998. This has been taken as a legal precedent by US courts and the policy has not changed. The ruling of the Department of Commerce in this investigation obviously runs counter to a legal precedent still in force as well as the customary practice of the Department of Commerce. This is also not conducive to the normal development of bilateral economic and trade ties.

What is more serious is that in this final ruling, the United States found that the Chinese government distorted the domestic prices of hot-rolled steel and that all standard steel pipe producers, from state-owned enterprises to private trading companies, even private production enterprises, received government subsidies in their purchases of hot-rolled steel. We think this runs counter to the provisions of WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures regarding what constitutes "subsidies."

The mistakes made by the United States in determining other items of subsidies and calculating the seriousness of the subsidies, as well as the resulting problems of double remedies, have greatly hurt the interests of Chinese enterprises, which is something not acceptable to the Chinese government and Chinese enterprises. China deeply regrets this untimely ruling by the United States when the China-US Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade and the China-US Strategic Economic Dialogue are about to take place.

China will careful study and assess the final ruling and seek a fair and just solution through the WTO dispute settlement mechanism and by legal means in order to effectively safeguard China's interests and the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises.

Posted on: Thursday, 12 June 2008, 06:00 CDT

Text of report by official Chinese news agency Xinhua (New China News Agency)

[Report by Reporter Wang Youling: "Ministry of Commerce Expresses Strong Dissatisfaction over US Final Ruling on Antidumping and Countervailing Investigations into Standard Steel Pipes"]

Originally published by Xinhua news agency domestic service, Beijing, in Chinese 1254 11 Jun 08.

BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific

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