Reducing/eliminating those mandatory joint ventures were a requirement for China to join WTO. But in practice it delayed these reforms.

Then someone should take the case to the WTO Appellate Body(0), unfortunately Trump and Biden have blocked appointments to it since 2019, so WTO rules cannot be enforced.

(0)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body

There are a million ways to cheat trade, the WTO was created to handle small disputes, not large structural imbalances. International Law was highly flawed in that regard owing back to Bretton Woods.

But of course it benefits everyone at the expense of deficit countries, so why change or truly address the literature. Appealing to international law today as such is just appealing to entrenched interests.

But the matter of fact is that in a true free trade regime, imbalances should rebalance back to zero. The fact that the deficit is only growing is more than enough evidence that China is obviously the violators here. And everybody knows this.

Under a multilateral Bancor System which Chinese economists themselves advocated back in 2009, China would have been immediately subjected to massive FX overvaluation to degrade their conpetiveness.

> Under a multilateral Bancor System which Chinese economists themselves advocated back in 2009

I had to look that up and this stood out

> U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner expressed interest in the idea of greater use of SDRs as a reserve. However, he was criticized severely for this in the United Statess, and the dollar lost 5 cents against the euro in exchange markets following his statements. He and President Barack Obama shortly afterwards backtracked Geithner's comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor#Proposed_revival

I'm beginning to see a pattern of which country is blocking any progress here.

Yeah, the US was wrong there and in Bretton Woods. But unless if this an exercise in nationalist polemics, that doesn't change the fact that China is the prime violator in such a system by virtue of their surplus, not the USA which runs a deficit.

Everyone who screws over the WTO has my sympathy.

Anyway, the Dutch should then make a law that demands WTO status or smth. As this is NOT nicely applying rule of law.