BEIJING, July 11: The United States on Monday called on China to give it full access to its enormous market and hinted that it will slap further restrictions on Chinese textile imports should they continue to surge. “What we will focus on very intensely is our exports to the Chinese market,” US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told reporters here. “China has full access to our market, what we want is full access to the Chinese market.”

He added: “Today we do roughly $35 billion of exports, that number needs to go up, that is the number we’ll focus on and that will be the reflection of whether we have more access to Chinese market or not.”

His comments followed the annual meeting of the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) in Beijing, which was also attended by US Trade Representative Rob Portman and US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns.

Vice Premier Wu Yi headed China’s delegation at the commission, which was established to tackle bilateral trade disputes and boost commercial relations.

The talks took place against a backdrop of mounting concern in Washington over Chinese policies including an inflexible currency regime that US companies say unfairly boosts Chinese exports.

The two sides appeared to fail to resolve the rift over Chinese textile exports to the US, with Guttierrez hinting that Washington could impose more restrictions if the exports continued to flood the American market.

“When we believe our market has been disrupted in a manner that requires action, we will consult with our Chinese partners on that,” he said. “We’ll continue to consult as we look at further market data in the future.”

On Friday, China and the US failed to resolve their differences on this issue at separate talks here.

China has protested the US imposition of import quotas after the global system on textile quotas was abolished on January 1.

The export-driven economic powerhouse stands to lose up to $3.0 billion in trade with the US because of such WTO “safeguards” implemented by Washington on seven categories of textiles from China.

Gutierrez, however, said some progress was being made on market access for US software and increased prosecutions for intellectual property rights (IPR) violations in China, but more work was needed to address US concerns.

“What matters ultimately is results ... we agreed to increase the number of prosecutions, we agreed that the number of cases taken forward will increase, and now what we have to do is to monitor those cases and compare them to what they have been doing this year,” he said.

“The ultimate outcome of increased efforts on piracy is that sales of legitimate goods increase.”

Guttierez declined to comment on the controversial $18.5 billion takeover bid by China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) for US oil major Unocal. The Bush administration has been under pressure to block the deal on national security grounds.

The two sides also inked agreements in which the US will provide three $3 million funding for training programmes in agriculture, bio-technology, banking and projects in the civil aviation and petro-chemical sectors in China.—AFP