On August 31, CIWTO invited Dr. Injoo SOHN, Director of International Public Affairs at the University of Hong Kong, to give a lecture on the topic of “Fairness in Global Economic Governance: The Study of China’s Anti-dumping Measures from a Comparative Perspective”. The lecture was hosted by Prof. Tu Xinquan, Dean of CIWTO. More than thirty faculty members and students attended the lecture.

  Dr. Sohn started his lecture from the definition of “fairness” and raised the key question — does the Chinese government took fairness into account in its decision making? To shed light on this question, Dr. Sohn utilized data on China’s anti-dumping cases and empirically tested the following hypothesis.

First, considering the different capacity of developed and developing countries and to maintain the stability of the global economic system, Chinese government tended to choose not to impose anti-dumping duties towards developing countries. On the other hand, in order to protect their own interests, the Chinese government tended to take retaliatory anti-dumping actions when facing anti-dumping measures from the developed countries.

To test the hypothesis, Dr. Sohn collected data on anti-dumping cases from TTBD database, the Ministry of Commerce, as well as relevant information from the Internet and newspapers. Taking soybean, broiler and stuff industries as an example, he concluded that the attitudes of Chinese government upon anti-dumping actions differentiated between developed and developing countries. Dr. Sohn also tested the hypotheses using public and government officials’ attitudes through questionnaire and interviews. He also noted that since there were many factors affecting fairness in policy decisions, how to measure fairness in global economic governance still needed further discussion.

  In the Q&A session, the participants had a lively discussion with Dr. Sohn around the lecture topic. Professor Tu suggested that using data on dispute settlement would be more applicable to test the hypothesis. Dr. Sun shared her views on trade issues about China and India. Some students also had a discussion with Dr. Sohn on the impact of China’s restriction on Korean entertainment.
The lecture ended successfully. Dr. Sohn’s interesting lecture was the first class on academic research to the first-year graduate students in CIWTO.

Translator: SHAN Wen
Revisor: GUO Zhengyi