At a recent WTO Committee on Trade-Related Investment Measures meeting, Japan brought up previously raised issues related to office device standards and China's procurement law, but China argued that this committee was not the appropriate place to discuss them.

In a new post, U.S. trade lawyer Jean Heilman Grier, a former USTR official who specializes in government procurement law, has written in detail about the procurement aspects of China's new efforts to attract foreign investment.

At the February meeting of the WTO's Committee on Trade-Related Investment Measures, Japan raised concerns with China's draft standards for office devices and its draft government procurement law.

At the November 2022 meeting of the WTO's Council for Trade in Goods, for which the minutes were recently circulated, several issues related to trade with China were raised for the first time (including U.S. subsidies on clean energy and semiconductors), and various other previously raised issues

As the Biden administration and Congress are debating and forming new China-related policies at the federal level, including policies on outbound investment to China and on government procurement, the stances of individual states on trade and investment with China are playing a bigger role these days and deserve greater attention.

Last week, the UK's House of Lords discussed an amendment to a procurement bill that would further exclude Chinese-made surveillance technology from the supply chain.

At the UK parliament last week, there was a discussion of the importance of electric bus manufacturing in the United Kingdom, during which concerns were expressed that Chinese electric buses were a threat to UK bus manufacturers.