Obama Could Be Buoyed by Victory Over China at W.T.O.

HONG KONG - China is expected to be a centerpiece of the third and final U.S. presidential debate on Monday night, and my colleague David Sanger, in a curtain-raiser, calls China “perhaps the most important long-term subject of the debate.”

Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger, has charged that President Obama has not pressed China hard enough on its trade policies, to the detriment of American firms and jobs. Mr. Obama has countered by calling Mr. Romney “a pioneer of outsourcing” and noting that his administration has brought twice as many trade cases against China as the previous administration.

The United States scored a victory in one of those trade cases last week, as a World Trade Organization panel ruled against China for imposing unfair tariffs on American-made specialty steel. The steel in question was manufactured at two factories - AK Steel of Ohio and ATI Allegheny Ludlum of Pennsylvania.

The W.T.O. ruling could well help Mr. Obama' s electoral chances in those key states.

“This is a victory for the United States as well as for American workers and manufacturers,” said Ron Kirk, the U.S. trade representative, adding that “China's unfair duties choked off nearly all” of the U.S. exports of the special rolled steel.

“The Obama administration,” Mr. Kirk said, “will not stand by and allow China to break international trade rules.”

Mr. Kirk's statement and some background on the case are here. The W.T.O. panel's ruling is on its Web site here.

James L. Wainscott, the chairman, president and C.E.O. of AK Steel, said in a statement that the company was “very grateful” to Mr. Kirk's office for “this excellent defense of the rights of U.S. manufacturers and U.S. workers.”

The administration filed the case in 2010, and the W.T.O. ruled against China in June of this year. The Ministry of Commerce in Beijing quickly appealed that decision, but the latest ruling effectively settles the matter.

“We are pleased that China at this point has no further avenue for appeals,” Mr. Wainscott said.

Derek Scissors, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative policy-research group, said in a Reuters report that the ruling was “a small benefit for the Obama campaign because it can advertise ‘beating China' in Ohio, but it's not a benchmark for anything.”

In the second of the three debates, Mr. Romney slammed China for currency manipulation and “stealing our intellectual property; our designs, our patents, our technology. There's even an Apple store in China that's a counterfeit Apple store, selling counterfeit goods.”

Indeed, there have been numerous fake Apple stores operating in China, and knockoff Apple products, which Rendezvous addressed earlier this year.

At least 25 stores in the city of Kunming alone were discovered last year after an American health-care worker began photogr aphing, videotaping and blogging about the phony stores.

The blogger, Jessica Angelson, who has since moved to New York to attend nursing and midwifery school, was contacted by the China Real Time blog of The Wall Street Journal after Mr. Romney's debate remarks about the Apple store.

Mr. Romney used the Apple-store example, she said, “as a shorthand to generate outrage about trade practices in China and as a shorthand that he will be quote unquote ‘tough on China.' It's a somewhat meaningless shorthand. I'm not entirely sure he knows what he's referring to at this point.”

Her blogging from Kunming - she has links to those posts here - drew submissions of other fake Apple outlets around the world, including one in the New York borough of Queens. That shop, according to the Journal blog, was “shut down after she posted a photo of it online.”

“It is more of a global issue,” Ms. Angelson said, “but it doesn't create as nice a story as Chi na ripping off Apple stores.”

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Apple opened an authentic store in Beijing, a gleaming three-level place, the company's largest in Asia.

The store, Apple's third official outlet in Beijing and its sixth on the Chinese mainland, has a first-class address - the renowned shopping street of Wangfujing, near the Forbidden City. The store employs about 300, local news reports said, and encompasses nearly 25,000 square feet.

Apple also has three stores in Shanghai, and there are two here in Hong Kong.