Anti-Dumping in My Backyard

Southwest Ohio's friendly neighborhood steelmaker, AK Steel, is among those being hit with antidumping tariffs by China, the Oxford Press reports:

The head of locally-based AK Steel said the company will “vigorously appeal” a decision by China, the world’s biggest steel consumer, to impose anti-dumping import taxes of up to 25 percent on specialized steel imports from Russia and the United States.China’s Ministry of Commerce said today, Dec. 10, that U.S. and Russian companies are selling flat-rolled electrical steel, a product used in the power industry for items such as transformers, at unfairly low prices in China. Starting Friday, Dec. 11, importers will need to pay anti-dumping deposits ranging from 10.7 percent to 25 percent to import the product from U.S. companies such as AK Steel.

Historically, the US steel industry has been a leading user of antidumping actions, so one naturally wonders if this is another example of the retaliation dynamic studied by Feinberg and Reynolds.