China denounces US trade ruling

Remedy measures will not solve industry's problems: official

The Chinese government and an industry group voiced strong opposition on Monday to US preliminary penalties on imports of certain solar power products from China.

The US rulings are "abuses of trade remedy measures," which cannot resolve development issues that the US solar industry is confronted with, an unnamed official at the Trade Remedy and Investigation -Bureau with the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said in a statement published Monday.

The official noted that the existing trade remedy measures adopted by the US in 2012 for solar power products imported from China had already "seriously disturbed" the normal trade.

"We hope the US can handle the investigation prudently, and end the investigation as quickly as possible," the official said.

The US Department of Commerce (DOC) said in a statement on Friday that certain solar panels and cells from the Chinese mainland and Taiwan are being sold at an unfair price, calling for preliminary anti-dumping duties as high as 165.04 percent for some mainland companies and up to 44.18 percent for some Taiwanese manufacturers.

The announcement will escalate the trade frictions in the solar sector between the two countries that began in November 2011.

Certain "major flaws" exist in the procedures of investigation and preliminary rulings by the US, according to a statement released by the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products (CCCME) e-mailed to the Global Times on Monday.

The CCCME said the US preliminary rulings are "inconvincible," as the US investigation agency unexpectedly determined the exact anti-dumping duties in cases where it has not stated the exact scale of products involved in the investigation.

"We have started comprehensive countermeasures including legal assistance and lobbying to safeguard the interests and rights of Chinese solar producers," a source at the legal department of the CCCME, who wished to remain anonymous, said on Monday.

The official also noted that some US enterprises of the downstream solar industry are also lobbying so as to support Chinese solar product manufacturers, as the China-made products "of high quality are very popular in the US."

"If the problems in the Sino-US solar industry are escalated, the upstream and downstream solar industries of both countries will suffer in the end," said the official of MOFCOM.

The US is the second largest market for Chinese solar product manufacturers after Europe. The Chinese mainland's total exports of solar products to the US were worth $1.5 billion in 2013, compared with an annual average of $20 billion to Europe in past few years, according to the source from the CCCME.