"The United States is committed to working with like-minded members to address our concerns with the functioning of the WTO," Shea told a Trade Policy Review session at WTO headquarters in Geneva on Monday. "The United States will be at the forefront of these efforts."
From forced technology transfer to the creation and maintenance of severe excess industrial capacity to a heavily skewed playing field in China, the results of China’s approach are causing serious harm to the United States and many other WTO members and their companies and workers, Shea explained.
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The United States also takes issue with a WTO dispute settlement procedure, which Washington contends has been abused to alter the organization’s internal rules in ways that bear little resemblance to the original WTO charter, according to Shea.
The Trump administration has abandoned the WTO as a primary means to settle trade disputes and instead turned to US trade laws that penalize foreign companies — especially Chinese companies — that dump products in the United States at unfairly low prices and also benefit from government subsidies that are illegal under WTO rules.