August 29, 2006	Tuesday	Sha'aban 4, 1427

BEIJING, Aug 28: US Trade Representative Susan Schwab began her first full day of talks in China on Monday, urging her host to assume a more active role in reviving stalled global trade negotiations, officials said.

Schwab, on her first visit to China, spent a large part of a more than three-hour-long meeting with Chinese Commerce Minister Bo Xilai emphasising China's responsibility in bringing the Doha Round back to life.

“Schwab stressed that China can have and should have a role in getting these talks back on track,” Schwab's spokesman Sean Spicer told AFP. “They acknowledged they could be more active and play a larger role.”

The Doha Development Round talks under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) were suspended last month amid a bitter dispute between Europe and the United States over farm tariffs and subsidies.

“We both share faith in a successful, viable Doha Round and a strong multilateral trading system,” Schwab told the BBC.

Warning that “the trade talks are still on life support,” Schwab said she had been in talks with a number of countries that “realize we really need to stretch politically, intellectually, to find a way out of this impasse”. ”It really is a matter of cold, hard, clear-eyed consultations to see is there some path that we haven't identified yet that can lead us to a success in this round,” she said.

Her visit to China was the last leg of an Asian tour that last week brought her to Malaysia and a meeting with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

The Malaysia meeting resulted in a pledge “to continue their close cooperation on all WTO issues ... (and) to putting the Doha Development Round back on track before the end of 2006,” an Asean-US joint statement said.

While seeking China's help to reinvigorate the Doha Round, Schwab, who arrived in China on Sunday, was also expected to raise bilateral Sino-US economic and trade issues.

Her spokesman said “very friendly, very respectful” talks had centred on issues such as the protection of intellectual property rights and auto parts.

She planned to “urge more progress by China on issues related to its WTO accession commitments,” the US Trade Representative's Office said in a statement issued prior to her visit.

Areas of concern included “strengthening enforcement of intellectual property rights and increasing access for American goods and services,” the statement said.

Washington is seriously concerned at China's enormous trade surplus with the United States, which hit a record 201 billion dollars last year according to US statistics.

There have also been doubts raised about Beijing's commitment to economic reform.—AFP