On January 8 in the briefing for the Chinese shoe makers to cope with the anti-dumping lawsuit, Wang Zhengtao, vice president of China Leather Industry Association and president of Aokang Group on behalf of four Chinese shoe-makers such as Aokang, Taima filing a lawsuit against EU appealed to more domestic peers to join hands together.

In October 2006 Aokang was the first to announce to bring the lawsuit against EU who levied anti-dumping duty on the leather shoe products originally made in China. Faced with two-year anti-dumping duty of 16.5%, currently only four enterprises such as Aokang officially filed lawsuit to the EU court while all the other over 1000 Chinese shoe-makers gave up the opportunity of lawsuit.

According to Pu Lingchen, the agency attorney recruited by four shoe-makers such as Aokang, on December 29, 2006, all the lawsuit materials were submitted to the EU court and it has officially accepted the lawsuit application from Chinese shoe-makers. Afterwards there will be two rounds of discussions between both sides. EU was likely to be the third party to support the council of EU. Then there was the oral discussion, which will be predicted to last for about 2 years. The court will enter the re-examination procedure soon. EU was estimated to have new moves towards China-made shoes this year.

As regards the lawsuit, Wang Zhengtao said that Chinese shoe-makers should make long-term preparations for the lawsuit against anti-dumping duty. Perhaps duty levy period has finished while the case still continued. First of all lawsuit enabled the European countries to hear resisting voice from Chinese shoe-makers. Faced with increasingly large pressure from anti-dumping duty, the domestic shoe-makers should establish an organization to jointly cope with the trade barriers.

Currently over 90% of shoe-makers in China are private enterprises with an annual output of 7 billion pairs of shoes nationwide, accounting for 70% of the total around the world. It was understood that Chinese shoe industry with meager profit suffered a big blow from 16.5% anti-dumping duty. Since EU levied temporary duty on China-made shoes, many orders from the clients have transferred to the surrounding countries. Furthermore, as the importers and exporters in the European countries took wait-and-see attitude towards the result of final award, the orders that Chinese shoe-makers can receive reduced obviously in 2006.