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| A Review on CPTPP Rules of State-owned Enterprises and the Chinese Response |
| Jiang Fen1, Zhou Wei2 |
1.Law School, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211, China
2.Graduate School, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China |
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Abstract CPTPP is regarded as a 21st Century Trade Agreement. China has expressed positive interest in its accession to CPTPP. The Chapter 17 of CPTPP, “State-owned Enterprises and Designated Monopolies”, constitutes an experimental precedent of multilateral rules for state-owned enterprises. There are “three prohibitions” against state-owned enterprises participating in global competition and overseas investment in the Chapter 17 of CPTPP. The first one is to prohibit state-owned enterprises from using subsidies to affect international trade between contracting parties and the export trade from contracting parties to a non-party. The second one is to prohibit state-owned enterprises from using subsidies to displace or impede the domestic sale of a good through an enterprise that is a covered investment. The third one is to prohibit state-owned enterprises from using subsidies from capital-exporting countries to cause injury to the domestic industries of capital-importing countries. Subsidy regulation on SOEs is the main aspect of the above “three prohibitions”.Governmental subsidies are mainly regulated by, among many statutes, international trade law and competition law. Subsidy is not only an unfair trade act in the sense of international trade law, but also an administrative restriction of competition from the perspective of competition law, so it constitutes the intersection of the above two sectoral laws. From the perspectives of title, hierarchy, wording and purpose, Chapter 17 has a strong color of competition rules. However, Chapter 17 has definite characteristics of trade remedy norms if it has been deeply examined in the two aspects of both rule contents and adjustment scope. Chapter 17 also has obvious characteristics of international political instruments instead of impartial legal rules with the purpose of competition neutrality.Chapter 17 of CPTPP does not follow the purpose of “ownership neutrality” and “balance between discipline on both subsidies and countervailing measures” in the SCM Agreement. It pursues the purpose of competition policy by means of trade remedies while ignoring distortive effect of over-regulative measures on subsidy. It imposes discriminatory regulations on state-owned enterprises, while ignoring the overall adjustment of market competition. It aims to safeguard the competitive interests of private enterprises while ignoring the overall increase in market competition. Therefore, it has the fundamental defects of imbalance between purpose and means. Chapter 17 of CPTPP constitutes a double standard in the application of law and will plunge state-owned enterprises into unfair and unreasonable situations of restricted business activity and blocked commercial investment.During the possible accession negotiations in the future, China should advocate the construction of multilateral norms of competition policy based on ownership neutrality, fairness and reasonableness. By such multilateral norms of competition policy, various monopolies and restrictions on competition conducted by transnational private enterprises could be also regulated as well as state-owned enterprises. It is also helpful to resolve the external benchmark dispute which is a long-time suffering issue for Chinese export. Meanwhile, China should make full use of reservation and exception rules during negotiating to reduce the number of regulated state-owned enterprises as less as possible and guarantee the normal commercial status of state-owned enterprises. The explanatory flexibility of the CPTPP definition of commercial activity should be well restrained. Business activities of state-owned enterprises should not be characterized as government acts because of such explanatory flexibility. When a state-owned enterprise acts on the basis of a government commission, it should not be characterized as a business activity and should not be exercised with judicial jurisdiction. Besides, China should insist that established state-owned enterprises are exempt from the standards of private investment practice provided in CPTPP articles 17.1 and 17.6. China should also advocate enriching private investment practices and insist that the commercial motivation should be the criteria when determining whether the investment made by the state-owned investors is consistent with the usual investment practices of private investors.
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Received: 12 April 2021
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2021, Vol. 51 
