When <i>lex specialis</i> fails: the conditional return to general international law in China’s 2025 unilateral trade retaliation and countermeasures regime

The 2025 revision of China’s Foreign Trade Law establishes two arrangements on trade retaliation and countermeasures. First, it authorizes unilateral retaliatory measures when dispute settlement mechanisms fail to function properly, responding to paralysis of the WTO Appellate Body and appeals into the void, which deny prevailing members binding rulings and authorized retaliation. Second, it empowers the Ministry of Commerce to impose trade prohibitions or restrictions on foreign individuals and organizations that endanger China’s sovereignty, security, or development interests, in coordination with the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, the Unreliable Entity List, and rules against unjustified extraterritorial application of foreign legislation. Drawing on both legal dogmatics and critical legal studies, this article provides a jurisprudential and critical examination of the legal basis of unilateral trade retaliation. It addresses four core issues: the paralysis of the WTO Appellate Body and the problem of appeals into the void; the normative tension between general international law and WTO law, including the limits of the lex specialis principle; the conceptualization of institutional failure in dispute settlement and the conditional re-entry of general international law; and the constraints imposed on unilateral retaliation by proportionality, necessity, and procedural due process.