Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 18, 1994 TAG: 9401180052
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
After three days of negotiations in Beijing, both sides signed a new three-year pact covering textile and apparel shipments from China to the United States.
The agreement will limit the growth in Chinese textile and apparel exports to the United States while providing new powers to stop illegal transshipments, which circumvent U.S. quotas by routing Chinese products through third countries.
The U.S. industry had claimed that these illegal shipments were worth $2 billion annually and cost 50,000 U.S. jobs.
"What we were facing in this area was massive fraud. The Chinese government knowingly and willing allowed state-run industries to circumvent agreed-upon rules," said U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor.
Kantor said he hoped the agreement would be the beginning of "a much healthier and more productive relationship" with the Chinese.
But he insisted there was no link between resolution of the textile dispute and other tensions between the two countries. These include administration charges that China has not done enough in the human-rights area to justify renewal of "most-favored-nation" low tariffs on Chinese goods shipped to the United States.
Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen was scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Wednesday for three days of talks with Chinese officials on a broad range of human-rights and economic issues. President Clinton must decide by June whether to extend China's low tariffs.
The textile negotiations resumed late Sunday only after the U.S. side signaled that it was ready to stop talking and allow the quota restrictions to take effect.
At a signing ceremony in Beijing, Chinese Trade Minister Wu Yi hugged her American negotiating counterpart, Jennifer Hillman, and said, "What we have promised, we will do."
Henry A. Truslow III, president of the American Textile Manufacturers Institute and head of Sunbury Textile Mills in Pennsylvania, said the U.S. textile industry was happy that the agreement will provide at least a framework for dealing with future quota violations.
But, he said, "By not cutting back on China's quotas, the U.S. government missed an opportunity to send a strong signal not only to China but to other transshippers such as Pakistan who illegally circumvent our quotas."
by CNB