Bush administration maintains fair-trade pressure on China

Bush administration maintains fair-trade pressure on China    The Bush administration has vowed to keep pressure on China to meet its World Trade Organization membership requirements for reducing tariffs and non-tariff barriers.
   “As China emerges as a larger presence on the world stage, our relations are growing more complex,” said U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez at the Bureau of Industry and Security’s annual export control controls and policy conference in Washington Monday. “We are managing a broad range of bilateral, regional, and global issues. The economic relationship (with China) is a central piece in this puzzle.”
   Gutierrez said the Bush administration has asked China to meet a handful of objectives:
   *Provide equal market access for non-Chinese companies.
   *Develop laws and regulations to promote fair competition between Chinese and non-Chinese companies.
   *Make economic decisions based on “free market forces, not political considerations.”
   *Govern by rule of law.
   *Ensure that “sensitive exports” from the United States are not diverted to end uses that threaten U.S. national security.
   China joined the WTO in 2001. The country has dropped its average tariffs from 41 percent to 6 percent, and recently made promises to the Bush administration to strengthen intellectual property rights protections.
   China is now the sixth largest market for U.S. exports and America’s third largest trading partner overall. Specifically, the Commerce Department noted that U.S. exports of computers, electrical equipment and other electronic products to China increased by 20 percent between 2002 and 2003, reaching $7 billion. Chemical exports increased 24 percent to $3.7 billion over the same period. Last year, U.S. companies exported $42 billion worth of merchandise and services to China.
   While progress has been made, “many people doing business in China feel that Chinese policies do not live up to the key principles,” Gutierrez said.
   He pointed out that the costs of production for some goods are still subsidized by the Chinese government. He also said that two-thirds of all counterfeit goods seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection come from China. “We know that 90 percent of the software sold within China was pirated,” Gutierrez said.
   “Some in China contend that our trade deficit would evaporate if the U.S. relaxed our export controls. But the tiny percentage of trade blocked by export license denials is little more than a rounding error,” Gutierrez said. “Make no mistake: U.S. export controls don’t create our trade deficit.”