Note that this trick is very hard to pull off in the long-term. China tried it with rare-earth metals, and production just started up elsewhere. In the short term it's annoying and causes disruptions.
It isn't very hard to pull off dumping, it's game that's been played for centuries. That's why all modern governments disallow it. China especially does it all the time, here's an example with solar: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/business/energy-environmen... .
> the companies were selling products below the cost of manufacture and that the Chinese companies were benefiting from unfair subsidies from their government.
I assume Foxconn does not get subsidies to sell iPhones below cost :)
I just don't understand how easy it is to determine the cost of manufacture something outside of one's economy and infrastruture.
I'm in Argentina at the moment and I'm constantly hearing local businesses accusing china of dumping because they can't produce more cheaply, but than everywhere else in the world we buy Huawei, Xiaomi, etc I feel that accusations of dumping are more political interpretations than measurable facts.
I understand. But how do we know the real cost when the country we are talking about is China? Even in transparent economies like the EU, you find convoluted ways to subsidize companies (or convoluted ways to accuse companies of receiving subsidies - depending where you stand in these issues)
Because they aren't being convoluted about it, their costs and subsidies are very obvious. They are simply losing money and keeping the mills going via state guaranteed debt (well, the banks are being ordered to lend).
I think the rare earth mines that tried starting up again were promptly driven under by China. For example, Molycorp (which started up production at the Mountain Pass mine in the US) was driven into bankruptcy a year ago soon after reaching full production. Not a bad deal for China at all - they got an almost decade-long monopoly on manufacturing using rare earth metals, which they can probably continue now, and those that tried to break their monopoly suffered massive losses.
