SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 17: The United States and China vied on Wednesday to thrash out a deal to control Chinese textile shipments, whose rapid growth has done much to stoke Sino-US trade tensions.

The Chinese delegation headed by Sun Jiwen, deputy director-general of the foreign trade ministry, handed over a proposal to the US team as the two-day meeting at a plush hotel here wound down.

“They gave us a proposal and we’ve got to think about it,” a US Commerce Department official said on condition of anonymity.

Sun suggested that Chinese textile industry representatives should travel to the United States to meet their US rivals face to face in a bid to lessen frictions.

“If we had more communication we would have less problems,” Sun told the meeting through an interpreter. “And then we would not be needed.” US officials had played down the immediate prospect of a comprehensive deal to regulate Chinese textile imports, which Washington says have surged 54 per cent since global quotas were scrapped on January 1.

David Spooner, the special negotiator for textiles in the US Trade Representative’s office, said earlier that progress had been made, but not enough to guarantee a pact by the scheduled end of talks later Wednesday.

“I don’t know if we will conclude an agreement but the tenor was very good,” he told reporters after the first round of negotiations Tuesday.

Spooner said both sides were trying to ease a “climate of uncertainty” engulfing US manufacturers, importers and retailers, as well as Chinese exporters.

The meeting was previously billed as a routine encounter to address US quotas slapped on a range of Chinese textile imports worth up to $2.5 billion.

But it was expanded as the United States seeks to emulate a deal reached by the European Union with China in June that averted a potential trade war over textiles.

China and the EU eased their tensions when they agreed to limit the growth of 10 Chinese textile products to the EU to between 8.5 and 12.5 per cent until the end of 2007.—AFP