WASHINGTON, Sept 15: The US textile industry clamoured on Thursday for new government safeguards against surging Chinese imports, accusing Beijing of negotiating in bad faith on a political deal to regulate the trade.

A coalition of industry organizations filed petitions with the US government demanding the renewal of nine quota safeguards covering 16 categories of Chinese textile imports through to the end of 2006.

“This is a crisis and the government has within its power the ability to help hundreds of thousands of workers and companies now,” Mark Levinson, chief economist of the UNITE HERE trade union, told reporters on a conference call.

The US quotas were due to expire at the end of this year, but industry officials said there was no hope of China taking their protests seriously after high-level talks in Beijing last month failed to achieve a breakthrough.

Auggie Tantillo, executive director of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, said the petitions were in line with safeguards allowed by the World Trade Organization.

“This is simply a determined effort on the part of the US industry to make sure we exercise our rights under the WTO and we prevent China from monopolizing the US market through its use of unfair trade practices,” he said.

Cass Johnson, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations, said the safeguards need to be renewed “because China is refusing to negotiate seriously on a comprehensive bilateral agreement”.

“We will continue to file and re-file safeguard petitions until China is willing to come to the table and negotiate seriously,” he said.

To the anger of US and European textiles producers, Chinese garment exports have rocketed since a global quota system was abolished on January 1 in line with WTO guidelines to liberalise the trade.

Nearly 400,000 US textile and apparel manufacturing jobs — 38 per cent of the total — have been lost since 2001, primarily due to a flood of subsidized Chinese clothes, the officials said.

Over the past seven months, Chinese apparel exports to the United States have rocketed by 850 million items, an average increase of 627 per cent, they said.

It is not a question of Chinese producers being more competitive, the US coalition insisted, accusing Beijing of sustaining its exports with “currency manipulation”, subsidies and cheap loans from state-owned banks.

Tantillo singled out Chinese production of man-made fibre trousers, which use polyester derived from oil. Chinese export prices in that category have slumped, despite sky-high oil prices, he said.

“It is ludicrous that the Chinese ... in the face of a global tightening in oil, can drop their price on polyester trousers by 40 per cent,” he said.—AFP