U.S. asks Beijing for a WTO favor

BEIJING Senior U.S. officials on Monday called on China to open its markets further but also sought Chinese help in breaking an impasse in global trade talks, a combination of tough demands and pleas for assistance that increasingly characterizes the broader Chinese-American relationship.

The demands for changes in Chinese commercial policies, together with a request for Chinese help in World Trade Organization negotiations, show how the China-U.S. economic relationship is becoming as complex as their security relationship.

Pentagon officials have struggled with urging China to slow its rapid military buildup in coastal provinces facing Taiwan, especially Beijing's deployment of hundreds of ballistic missiles, while asking that China use its influence in Pyongyang to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.

In speeches and interviews in Beijing just six days before President George W. Bush arrives for talks with China's leaders, both Rob Portman, the U.S. trade representative, and David Sampson, the deputy secretary of commerce, repeated previous demands for China to protect U.S. copyrights, trademarks and patents.

They also asked that more U.S. companies be allowed to compete in China's domestic market.

But Portman said he was also urging senior Chinese officials to become more active in WTO negotiations to produce a new global free trade pact.

"I believe that China, being a major player now in the global trading system, and a major beneficiary of the multilateral trading system, has a responsibility to be more engaged in the talks," he said in an interview.

The United States particularly hopes that the Chinese government will join in the demands from many countries for the European Union to accept deep reductions in EU farm subsidies, Portman said.

"I haven't told them what to do, but I think it's fairly obvious," he added.

"Once becoming engaged, you can't help but see that the problem right now is that the European Union is not willing to agree to an agriculture proposal that provides for meaningful market access, and until they do, it is impractical to think this round can be successful."

Portman's comments reflect growing American frustration with China's near silence on the global trade talks.

Just four weeks remain until trade ministers from 148 countries and customs territories arrive for talks in Hong Kong, a Chinese possession, but Chinese officials have largely stayed on the sidelines.

China has unique influence in Europe, as the leaders of Britain, France and Germany have each been making almost annual visits to Beijing in recent years. President Hu Jintao of China has been touring Europe this week, staying with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and dining with King Juan Carlos I at the Zarzuela Palace in Madrid but saying nothing publicly on trade.

Portman also delivered a strongly worded speech in Beijing exhorting China to dismantle a variety of regulations that have limited the expansion of U.S. companies in China's telecommunications, insurance and direct sales markets.

He also denounced China's policy of limiting multinational automakers to 50 percent stakes in assembly plants.

"There is no reason foreign automakers should not be able to own 100 percent of their Chinese joint ventures," Portman said.

The Chinese policy is aimed at forcing the transfer of cutting-edge technology to Chinese automakers that may soon become large exporters of their own models.

Sampson took a noticeably less confrontational tone in a speech three hours later, urging China to limit counterfeiting but also emphasizing successes in the bilateral relationship, like the profitable operations that many U.S. companies have set up in China.

"To focus exclusively on the U.S. trade deficit is, I think, to look at only one part" of a broader trading relationship in which real progress is being made, he said.

Portman and Sampson spoke at a Beijing conference on trade, diplomacy and scientific research that was organized to a large extent by former President George Bush and by the presidential library foundation and the public policy school that bear his name, both at Texas A&M University.

The four-day conference, which runs through Thursday, has attracted a list of current and former top government officials who are Bush family friends as well as many senior Chinese officials.

Liao Xiaoqi, China's vice minister of commerce, was conspicuously silent on WTO issues in his remarks on a panel with Sampson.

He highlighted the arrests of 4,080 people in less than a year on a variety of illegal copying charges. He blamed the U.S. trade deficit with China partly on U.S. limits on the export to China of technologies that may have military as well as civilian applications.

Liao also criticized the United States for imposing some import limits already. These have fallen on Chinese products ranging from socks to bedroom furniture.

"Trade protection measures by the U.S.," he said, "have been on the rise."