Law Commons^™

The Wages Of Belonging: Rare Earths From China, And The Return Of Gatt À La Carte, Chin Leng Lim, J. H. Senduk

Chin Leng Lim

China has lost the Rare Earths case before a Panel which, however, split 2:1 on whether the Chinese Accession Protocol's general ban on export duties would allow General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Article XX to be invoked. The question affects whether other Recently Acceded Members' (RAMs') WTO-plus terms of accession should generally be read together with the GATT. Export quotas are unproblematic because Article XI is contained in the GATT. China's quota-based conservation measures were however strictly scrutinized, raising other questions about the room RAMs have to invoke Article XX if they might have to depend upon highly …

'You Don't Miss Your Water 'Til Your River Runs Dry': Regulating Industrial Supply Shortages After 'China-Raw Materials', Chin Leng Lim, J. H. Senduk

Chin Leng Lim

Global industrial production depends on stable access to raw inputs. Food price volatility has emerged as a major concern for Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G20), while we are hearing new calls for bringing global disciplines to resource cartels like the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Supply chains that make up globalized production recently demonstrated their potential fragility when Chinese sovereign intervention threatened to bring Japan’s high-tech manufacturing to its knees by cutting off its supplies. These wide-ranging issues are now being addressed under the umbrella of trade regulation. As a result, we are …

East Asia’S Engagement With Cosmopolitan Ideals Under Its Trade Treaty Dispute Provisions, Chin Leng Lim

Chin Leng Lim

An East Asian view about how trade dispute settlement systems should be designed is slowly emerging. This paper argues that democratically-inspired trade law scholarship and cultural explanations of the international law behaviour of the Southeast and Northeast Asian trading nations have failed to capture or prescribe the actual treaty behaviour of these nations. Instead, such behaviour has resulted in the emergence of two different treaty models for the peaceful settlement of trade disputes. This article traces the practices of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), together with that of China, Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. We find two …

China And The Doha Development Agenda, Chin Leng Lim, Jiangyu Wang

Chin Leng Lim

The China–Asean Tariff Acceleration Clause, Chin Leng Lim

Chin Leng Lim