China should be more practical in WTO rows - official

BEIJING (Reuters) - China should take a more hard-headed approach to trade disputes and use the World Trade Organisation's settlement process to deal with them, a Chinese trade official was quoted as saying on Sunday.

Lu Xiankun, press counsellor at China's WTO mission, told a conference in Shanghai that China should use the trade body's dispute settlement mechanism in a more "practical" and "rational" manner, Xinhua news agency reported.

And China would have more opportunities to file suits as the world trade environment got tougher for Chinese exporters, he said, with China's domestic stimulus measures expected to trigger more disputes.

China has been hit with a raft of trade complaints this year. Some have accused it of restricting exports of key materials and others have complained about it dumping goods abroad, destroying the competition with unfairly cheap prices.

China had filed four dispute settlement cases at the WTO by the end of May and had been on the receiving end of 14, Lu said.

Deputy Commerce Minister Yi Xiaozhun said on Saturday that in 2008, 40 percent of anti-dumping complaints and 70 percent of subsidy cases were directed at China.

In the first four months of this year, 13 countries and regions lodged 38 trade cases against China, a rise of 27 percent from the same months of 2008.