China has served notice to World Trade Organisation members including the European Union and United States that complaints about its cheap exports will need to meet a higher standard from December 2016, a Beijing envoy said at a WTO meeting.
Ever since it joined the WTO in 2001, China has frequently attracted complaints that its exports are being "dumped", or sold at unfairly cheap prices on foreign markets. Under world trade rules, importing countries can slap punitive tariffs on goods that are suspected of being dumped.
Normally such claims are based on a comparison with domestic prices in the exporting country.
But the terms of China's membership stated that -- because it was not a "market economy" -- other countries did not need to use China's domestic prices to justify their accusations of Chinese dumping, but could use other arguments.