Mark Wu

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.

China's efforts to become a global powerhouse in the technology of the future are under attack. But don't expect it to beat a retreat....But any measures Xi might announce are expected to be a continuation of the gradual changes it has been introducing in recent years to open more of its economy to the world. "China is accelerating a series of economic reforms, many of which it would have enacted eventually anyway, and attempting to package it as a major concession to US demands," said Mark Wu, an international trade professor at Harvard Law School. Trump administration officials are still taking a wary approach to what China's offering.

Rattled by rapid oil price swings in recent months, Southeast Asian economies are on tenterhooks ahead of an OPEC meeting this week that is expected to result in a supply cut to boost prices..."What the [Trump-Xi] meeting yielded is simply a temporary cease-fire agreement," said Mark Wu, professor of law at Harvard University and an adviser to the World Trade Organization. "For it to hold will require that much more progress be made in the negotiations over the next 90 days." So far, he said, "the two sides have not been able to resolve the systemic challenges plaguing the relationship, such as [intellectual property] theft and technology transfer. Unless those thorny issues are resolved, there eventually will be renewed calls to step up the pressure once more."

It’s said that there are no winners in a trade war. But as US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare to meet in Buenos Aires this weekend, the consensus is that China will sit down in a weaker economic position...Washington has less to worry about than China’s policymakers, who are facing the tough choice between greater fiscal stimulus and economic reform priorities such as deleveraging, said Mark Wu, an expert on international trade and international economic law with Harvard University. “Because of the strong recent economic expansion, US economic policymakers have fewer short term systemic issues about which to worry,” he said. “And President Trump’s voters have been willing to tolerate the negative cost of a trade war given their support for his other domestic policies.”

U.S. President Donald Trump wants to rip up the rulebook for global trade. China is by many accounts abusing it...“What has changed is not the substance but rather the style of U.S. engagement,” said Harvard Law school professor Mark Wu. “The U.S. has made clear that it will continue to block new appointments to the Appellate Body until its long-standing concerns are addressed satisfactorily. I expect the U.S. to stand firm on this pledge, even if it means paralyzing the Appellate Body,” he said.

When the Trudeau government agreed to a revised North American free trade deal, the Americans said Canada also agreed to something else: joining Donald Trump's trade war on China...."Although free trade agreements regularly require consultations on a variety of issues, they are typically on more narrow regulatory matters," said Mark Wu, an international trade professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in Chinese trade issues. "Article 32.10 of the USMCA represents a novel and unprecedented approach," he said. And reiterating the six-month notice language in this part of the text is "particularly extraordinary."

The trade war really is on — counterproductive and unnecessary and yet likely to last...That said, the W.T.O. as currently structured cannot adequately deal with a state-driven economy like China’s, as Mark Wu, a law professor at Harvard, has argued. Yes, China has cut back on directly subsidizing exports, a clear violation of W.T.O. guidelines. But many Chinese companies still benefit indirectly from access to underpriced state-owned land and privileged relations with local authorities and banks, and those issues are not explicitly covered in the regulations.

...Mark Wu, a Harvard Law School professor and former US trade official, said that despite previous US administrations’ complaints, some member countries have been “perfectly happy to let the rules stay as they have been, to the disadvantage or dismay of the US”. “Obviously this administration is taking a very different tack” to previous administrations, said Wu, who was the USTR director for intellectual property from 2003-04. He currently sits on the advisory board of a WTO programme that promotes the understanding of trade among academics and policymakers in developing countries.

Donald Trump's trade representative said Tuesday that "a fair amount of distance" remains between the Canadian and U.S. sides in the NAFTA talks — but it was pretty obvious that it's China, not Canada, dominating Robert Lighthizer's thoughts lately...."Given the Trump administration's goal of closing transshipment loopholes, it shouldn't be altogether surprising that the U.S. is seeking for its free trade partners to apply a like-minded approach toward so-called non-market economies," said Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies the strategy of state-owned industries in China. "Without it, there's the danger that foreign producers benefiting from unfair trade practices could use a revised NAFTA as a back door to circumvent U.S. tariffs."

The US is imposing new tariffs on $200bn worth of Chinese goods as it escalates its trade war with Beijing. We hear from Mark Wu, professor of international trade law at Harvard Law School.

The US is imposing new tariffs on $200bn worth of Chinese goods as it escalates its trade war with Beijing. We hear from Mark Wu, professor of international trade law at Harvard Law School.

Perhaps no part of President Trump’s campaign to overhaul U.S. trade policy enjoys broader support than his indictment of China. Yet if the president’s push to reshape the U.S.-China trade relationship reflects a bipartisan consensus, his method for doing so does not...China generally complies with global regulators’ edicts when it loses a dispute. But its economic model poses a unique challenge that global regulators are failing to meet, said Mark Wu, a former U.S. trade negotiator who teaches at Harvard Law School. The Trump administration sees that challenge as growing more acute as an increasingly prosperous China targets the innovative high-technology industries that the United States dominates. China joined the WTO in 2001 after more than two decades of moving from Maoist autarky toward an export-oriented, market-based economy. In its first years as a member of the global trading club, China developed in unanticipated ways, according to Wu.

...The moves against China are part of Mr. Trump’s wider effort to upend longstanding U.S. policy on trade and also the international institutions and agreements that govern trade. Whether the administration’s shift is a much-needed corrective or a disastrous reversal depends in large part on how one views the original decision to bring China into the international trade regime...Greater economic growth led to greater political control, said Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School whose research focuses on China and the WTO. China’s leaders believed that they needed unchallenged authority to carry out economic reform in the face of opposition from entrenched interests. According to Mr. Wu, the point of freer markets, in their view, was to encourage competition and prevent the system from becoming sclerotic, not to bolster individual rights.