Posted on 12/08/2003 4:40:31 PM PST by maui_hawaii
NEW YORK – China's Premier Wen Jiabao warned the Bush administration Monday against imposing further trade barriers on Chinese products and urged Washington to find ways of increasing exports to his country as a way of lowering its ballooning trade deficit.
Wen, visiting New York before heading to Washington for talks with President Bush, sought to defuse trade tensions and defend China's trade policies.
"I have come to this country to seek friendship and cooperation, not to fight a trade war," he told American business executives during a luncheon sponsored by the American Bankers Association.
But his words were firm.
Wen urged the United States to play by global trade rules set by the World Trade Organization, which China joined two years ago, and to "not politicize economic and trade issues."
"Reducing Chinese exports to the United States is not a good answer" because it would not bring jobs back to the United States, Wen said. "Instead, it will seriously harm the interests of millions of American consumers and U.S. firms operating in China."
Facing re-election next autumn, Bush is under increasing pressure from American workers and businessmen to stop the flood of cheap Chinese goods, which they complain is taking away American jobs.
The U.S. administration put quotas on certain Chinese textiles and apparel last month and is threatening to levy duties on Chinese television sets. Disputes over Chinese furniture and barriers to American soybean sales in China are also probable.
U.S. officials also have lobbied China to stop pegging the value of the Chinese currency to the U.S. dollar. U.S. manufacturers contend that the practice gives Chinese goods as much as a 40 percent advantage over American products.
Wen said "the two sides should seek consensus on major issues while accepting differences on minor issues, instead of imposing restrictions and sanctions at every turn."
Wen, who is on his first visit to the United States since taking office in May, said he would ask Bush to upgrade the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade "so as to better serve bilateral trade and economic cooperation."
The U.S. trade deficit with China stood at $103 billion last year and is headed for $120 billion or higher this year, the largest imbalance ever recorded between the United States and any country.
China has been busy shopping for American products to ease the trade imbalance. Wen, leading a delegation of Chinese trade officials and business executives, toured the General Electric offices in New York.
The premier urged the U.S. administration to drop trade barriers against the export of high-tech products such as high-end computers and nuclear power and satellite technologies.
"We should not expect Chinese people to be buying Boeing planes and eating your soybeans" while being denied the opportunity to import other high-tech U.S. products, he said.
Earlier Monday, Wen rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. He also met separately with the governor of New Jersey and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Speaking at a news conference earlier, Ma Kai, China's minister of national development and reform commission, defended his country's exchange rate policy, saying it was not to blame for the U.S. trade deficit. U.S. companies complain China has kept its currency artificially low so that its goods are cheaper for Americans.
"If we reform the exchange rate system irrationally when the conditions are not right, it would seriously disrupt China's economy and the global economy, particularly in Asia," Ma warned.
Wen's U.S. visit has also been marked by tension over the island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as part of China.
In a move likely to be welcomed by China, the Bush administration warned Taiwan Monday against any steps that could move the island toward independence, including an upcoming referendum.
It also warned China against using force or taking other provocative steps to further increase tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
The premier urged the U.S. administration to drop trade barriers against the export of high-tech products such as high-end computers and nuclear power and satellite technologies.
"We should not expect Chinese people to be buying Boeing planes and eating your soybeans" while being denied the opportunity to import other high-tech U.S. products, he said.
I won't even hesitate to call this guy an idiot. If America had NO restrictions whatsoever on ANY technology sales to China, it MIGHT (in a good year) add $1b to our total exports to China.
Then we would only need about $129 billion more to deal with the deficit.
The problem is not at all in our restrictions. It would cost us a HELLUVA lot more to give them that tech than to restrict it.
I am telling you this guy is a friggin idiot.
The problem is China thinking "you should be honored to be able to buy Chinese products"...
The problem is structured in China's economy.
LVM
Hard to say when it started but it picked up in velocity when the Manchurian candidate was in office. Bush just seems to be continuing with the pattern.
Great opening line! And a big "hello" to you too!
"The trade "imbalance" with the chinese will not be changed one iota by forcing that medieval serfdom's slaves -- more than a billion of whom subsist on around $300.00 per year -- to buy American goods."
The point is not the welfare of Chinese citizens or industries, the point is whether or not we allow our own citizens and industries to be displaced in a wholesale manner by the practices of Chinese industries, and the ChiCom government. The ChiComs recently made a statement concerning their monetary policy that you might find interesting. That statement said, in effect, that they could not afford to let the Renminbi (aka yuan) to float on world markets because they had "too many bad investments" in their system to allow it. In other words, they had too many bad investments by their government into industries that are dumping shiploads of cheap goods onto our shores.
This is an old trick used by monopolists to drive competitiors out of business, a technique known as "dumping". Once you have driven your competition out of business, you raise the price of your goods to whatever you want to, because there is no competition left. I believe this is not a good thing. We are losing critical skills in engineering, manufacturing, machining and tooling, and everyone is sending their kids to law school. What kind of a future does that create for our nation?
"All that must happen to reduce the "trade deficit" is that we Americans buy American."
Easier said than done. I've spend hours and hours in stores trying to find goods that were made in America, or at least not made in China. Sometimes I actually find some goods that are made in America, but usually not. Our stores are full of Chinese goods, and I'm not happy about that.
"Something that will not happen until America's mobbed up unions, mobbed up corporations, mobbed-up environmentalist wacko wankers and their mobbed-up politician mates all get to Hell out of the way of America's vast creative, innovative, productive and manufacturing superiority and permit our consequently FReed-up enterprises to resore their presently regulated out of existence competitiveness with the rest of the world."
There is a lot of truth in that statement, but do you want to go back to the days of child labor? China has actual slaves who are chained to their machines making many of their products. Is that what we want to be become?
Anyway, for future reference, I'm not an idiot. I used to design deep-submicron mixed-signal integrated circuits for a living, and I now specialize in using programs like Final Cut Pro to edit video, and Photoshop/ImageReady/LiveType to create video animations. I may be wrong, perhaps mistaken, maybe even possessed of a misplaced passion or two, but I'm not an idiot. Try to moderate your invective a bit in the future.
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