Mark Wu

Hours after China announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods on Friday, President Donald Trump ordered U.S. companies to “start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”...Trump could treat China more like Iran and order sanctions, which would involve declaring a national emergency under a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA...Invoking IEEPA could also trigger legal challenges in U.S. courts, said Mark Wu, a professor of international trade at Harvard Law School...A far more dramatic measure, albeit highly unlikely, would be to invoke the Trading with the Enemy Act, which was passed by Congress during World War One. The law allows the U.S. president to regulate and punish trade with a country with whom the United States is at war. Trump is unlikely to invoke this law because it would sharply escalate tensions with China, said Wu. “It would be a much more dramatic step to declare China to be an enemy power with which the U.S. is at war, given the president has at times touted his friendship with and respect for President Xi (Jinping),” said Wu. “That would amount to an overt declaration, while IEEPA would allow the Trump administration to take similar actions without as large of a diplomatic cost.”

The US-China trade war rages on and dominates conversation ahead of the G20 summit this week. A US veto of appeals judges at the World Trade Organisation threatens to bring that cornerstone of the global economic order to a standstill by December, a month out from its 25th anniversary...Harvard Law School professor Mark Wu says the complexity of negotiations will delay any potential agreement. "The frustration that the US and possibly others have faced in relying upon the WTO to deal with its China-related trade challenges stems, in part, from the lack of a thorough updating of WTO rules over the past two decades," he says.

Earlier this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed a crowd gathered for the second summit of his signature infrastructure policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)...With the BRI, Xi is signaling China’s readiness to reprise a more proactive geopolitical role, according to Harvard Law professor and international trade expert Mark Wu. “President Xi, much more than his predecessors, is assertive of this idea of the China dream — part of [which] is about national rejuvenation and China rightfully stepping back onto the global stage,” he said.

The U.S.-China trade blowup was a long time coming. And it won't be easily resolved, not even if U.S. and Chinese negotiators reach a truce in the next few weeks that reassures jittery financial markets. Tensions between the world's two biggest economies intensified over the last week. The Trump administration more than doubled tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports and spelled out plans to target the $300 billion worth that aren't already facing 25% taxes. The escalation covers everything from sneakers to toasters to billiard balls. ...Critics now say the Geneva-based WTO, which sets trade rules and mediates disputes, was ill-equipped to handle China's unorthodox blend of capitalism and state control. In the Chinese system, it is tough to tell whether a company is seeking profits in the conventional way or is acting with the support and on behalf of the government to achieve China's strategic goals. The U.S., for example, says that the telecommunications equipment supplied by China's Huawei can be used to spy on foreign countries. "China's economy is fundamentally different— even unique," Mark Wu of Harvard Law School wrote in an influential 2016 paper. "The WTO rules, as written, are not fully equipped to handle the range of economic problems associated with China's rise."

China held back from immediate retaliation for higher U.S. tariffs, unlike in past rounds, taking time to weigh its options amid uncertainty over how the Chinese economy would weather a full-bore trade conflict. A failure to break an impasse in talks in Washington on Friday opened a new phase in the trade fight after more than five months of back-and-forth negotiations. This time, some economists and analysts said, Beijing is taking stock of potential economic damage from higher tariffs. “China doesn’t want to fan the flames,” Mark Wu, an international trade professor at Harvard University, says. “It wants to be seen as the reasonable party and open to compromise.”

The new hard line taken by China in trade talks—surprising the White House and threatening to derail negotiations—came after Beijing interpreted recent statements and actions by President Trump as a sign the U.S. was ready to make concessions, said people familiar with the thinking of the Chinese side. ... “The U.S. is correct to seek a multiprong approach of not relying solely on commitments but also actually changes to the laws, so as to ensure Chinese leadership intentions are fully conveyed down to all local levels of government,” said Harvard Law Professor Mark Wu.

One standard criticism of Trump’s emphasis on bilateral trade—and reducing the bilateral trade deficit—is that it’s leading China back toward a world of managed trade. ...Forget the formal structure of “trade”—tariffs, quotas and the like. They don’t matter much when the bulk of China’s imports are carried out by state owned companies, or by private companies that can only import with a license from China’s state. Go back and re-read Mark Wu's rightly celebrated article on China, Inc's challenge to the global trading rules.

In the 1980s, China was beginning a long economic boom that would transform the global trading system, and Michael Korchmar decided to go there to launch a joint venture. He quickly soured on the country. ... Consider this: China has more companies in the Fortune 500 than any country except the United States. More than half of those firms are controlled by a single government agency, the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, wrote Harvard Law Professor Mark Wu, in a 2016 article, "The 'China, Inc.' Challenge To Global trade Governance."

The World Bank can be sued when its overseas investments go awry. And so can some other international organizations. That is the clear message from the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week issued a 7-1 decision in Jam v. International Finance Corporation, ruling for the first time that international financial institutions, including various branches of the bank and other U.S.-based organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank, can be subject to lawsuits in cases where their investments in foreign development projects are alleged to have caused harm to local communities. ..."This decision certainly opens the door for more lawsuits," says Mark Wu, an international trade law scholar at Harvard Law School, who was not involved in the suit. "It may cause [international financial institutions] to be more cautious in the operations of the projects themselves." Wu added that the new legal liability might make the World Bank think twice about whether to fund projects that could come with high environmental or social risks.

In the 1980s, China was beginning a long economic boom that would transform the global trading system, and Michael Korchmar decided to go there to launch a joint venture. He quickly soured on the country. ...Consider this: China has more companies in the Fortune 500 than any country except the United States. More than half of those firms are controlled by a single government agency, the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, wrote Harvard law professor Mark Wu, in a 2016 article, "The 'China, Inc.' Challenge To Global trade Governance." ... "The closest analogue would be if, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. Treasury Department set up a single government entity to act as the controlling shareholder of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo," Wu wrote. Even when a company has no explicit ties to the government or the party, executives must work hard to stay in Beijing's good graces, if they want their companies to have access to the best contracts, Wu says. "People understand what the objectives are and they'll operate within those confines," he says.

For the past two months, people have gathered on a street in Vancouver’s pricey Dunbar neighbourhood, snapping photographs of a $4m mansion with its blinds drawn.  Onlookers are not interested in the exterior of the house — but they are concerned about the fate of its resident, Huawei’s finance chief Meng Wanzhou, who is currently under house arrest awaiting an extradition hearing on US fraud charges. ... Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School, said: “In theory the president could direct his attorney-general to drop the investigation.” But he added: “Normally the White House doesn’t interfere so openly at this stage and doing so might undermine the credibility of future extradition requests.”

When China joined the World Trade Organization, the global fraternity of cross-border commerce, it promised to open itself up to foreigners in lucrative businesses like banking, telecommunications and electronic-payment processing. More than 17 years later, China’s telecommunications industry remains firmly under government control. ... “At this point, a full-scale accord seems unlikely,” said Mark Wu, a Harvard Law School professor and former United States trade official.

Huawei chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou is set for a long battle as she fights extradition from Canada to the United States, a process that could be complicated by intervention from US President Donald Trump, analysts say. ... International trade law specialist Mark Wu, from Harvard Law School, said that because the criminal charges against Huawei and Meng were overseen by the Department of Justice, Trump could intervene though his acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker. “However, he should exercise extreme caution in doing so and not undermine the rule of law,” Wu said. “Any perception that her arrest is meant to offer political leverage in upcoming trade negotiations could jeopardise the success of the ongoing extradition hearings in Canadian court.”

At his confirmation hearings for the position of U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, the nation’s chief trade negotiator, promised to fight for all of America’s great industries. Yes, he acknowledged, he had built his three-decade career by lobbying for the steel industry. But he was ready, he said, to make the world safe again for good old-fashioned American capitalism, in all its forms. He recalled a caution he’d received from a senator: “As you go through doing your job, remember that you do not eat steel.” ... The WTO risks irreparable damage from Lighthizer’s battles with China. In an influential article, Mark Wu, a Harvard Law professor who negotiated intellectual-property deals for the U.S. government, made the case that China’s accession to the WTO was premised on a mistaken assumption that the organization could accommodate the country’s authoritarian system.

China’s backsliding on market reform and its trade practices in the past decade is “very disturbing”, said Charlene Barshefsky, the former US trade representative who opened the door to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) for China. ... Mark Wu, a law professor at Harvard University who worked in the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) during the George W Bush administration, echoed her analysis. “Undoubtedly, China’s desire to join the WTO played a major role in spurring market-oriented reforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s and prevented them from being undone by conservatives,” said Wu, who was the USTR’s director for intellectual property from 2003-04.

The United States accused China on Thursday of sustained efforts to steal trade secrets and technologies from at least 12 countries in an enormous hacking campaign – a move that deals a blow to Beijing during negotiations to ease the trade war. ... Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies international trade issues, questioned whether the condemnations would have any effect.

President Trump has weaponized tariffs to upend the global rules of international trade — but can his policies withstand the peanut butter test? On Wednesday, a three-judge panel, deliberating in a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan, considered the most far-reaching legal challenge to the president’s aggressive use of national security to justify placing levies on steel and aluminum imports from Europe as well as from Canada, Mexico, China and other nations. ... “There are very few cases, but the precedents all suggest that Congress can delegate this authority to the president, and he has a wide discretion when it comes to issues of national security,” said Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies international trade issues.