China has developed an early-warning system to monitor and supervise changes in the nation's major exports and imports, according to officials from the Ministry of Commerce.

Co-ordinating the work of governments, industrial councils and enterprises, such a mechanism has been established to forecast and minimize possible trade disputes.

The system mainly focuses on items whose rapid spread will arouse concerns in their target markets.

In order to facilitate the supervision of the country's exports, the Chinese customs have retained the exports codes on textiles used in the quota system recently scrapped among World Trade Organization (WTO) members.

The latest export statistics have been released on the customs website, but so far there are still some technical problems in integrating customs data, experts said.

The ministry has continued to update the information on its website about every trade conflict case concerning China, including anti-dumping, anti-subsidy and special safeguarding cases, said Wang Shouwen, director of the ministry's department of fair trade.

Different levels of chambers of commerce should communicate between the governments and the companies.

"Information from the industrial councils and its local branches better aims at a specific area," he said.

Experts said the efforts of enterprises involved in exports and imports were of greater importance in dealing with trade conflicts.

Wang suggested that besides the statistics from the governments and industrial councils, enterprises might collect information from other institutions.

For example, he said, the Shanghai WTO Affairs Consultation Centre monitored the surge of certain products' exports to certain countries, based on customs statistics of both China and the target country.

Zhou Shijian, an official with the Beijing-based WTO Research Association, said enterprises should be calm before conflicts because China is likely to face some trade disputes as the third-largest trader in the world.

Actually, the country has become one of the largest victims of trade disputes charges in the world.

From January to September 2004, Chinese companies were accused of 46 anti-dumping, anti-subsidy and protectionist measures and subject to special safeguard investigations from 12 countries and regions, reflecting a 4.5 per cent increase year-on-year.

Zhou said enterprises must remain aware of the policy changes in their target markets to overcome potential technical barriers.

Only by following and analyzing the regulations and technical rules, can Chinese enterprises find the unfair or illegal rulings in them, he said.

In addition, Zhou urged the enterprises to be more active in dispute investigations so as to protect themselves using the legal methods of WTO.

He took the furniture anti-dumping cases launched by the United States as an example. In this case the domestic furniture makers, who did not answer the case, were charged a punitive duty of 98 per cent while the tariffs on those who answered the investigation were only 6 per cent.

Experts also hoped the domestic companies would cash in on the qualified lawyers to fight against their rivals in the anti-dumping charges.

Source: China Daily