【10.06.11 纽约时报】Senators Losing Patience With U.S. Policy on China

青蛙小王子

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/business/11geithner.html?ref=china
WASHINGTON — Leading senators frustrated by a lack of progress by the Obama administration signaled on Thursday that they were willing to consider retaliatory measures to address China’s policies on trade, currency and intellectual property.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner testified before the Senate Financial Committee on Thursday.

At a Senate Finance Committee hearing, the members suggested that President Obama’s strategy of quiet diplomacy was producing limited results.
In testimony to the panel, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner could point to only a few accomplishments from the annual bilateral talks he attended in Beijing last month with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
As both economies struggle to recover from the recession, longstanding complaints have gotten louder that China gives unfair support to its export-oriented manufacturers, fails to abide by World Trade Organization agreements, permits the theft of American intellectual property and protects its domestic industries from competition from abroad.
Mr. Geithner said “we want China to provide a level playing field” and vowed, as he and his predecessors had done before, “to engage forcefully with China.”
He said China had published a draft measure to change “some of the troubling aspects” of a new system China used to accredit products as eligible for government procurement contracts. Mr. Geithner also said China had agreed to “a high-level process over the coming weeks and months” to discuss its innovation policies.
China also agreed to submit by July a revised proposal for joining a W.T.O. agreement on government procurement, and to ease foreign investment in some areas. Mr. Geithner said the administration would “apply the full arsenal of tools available” to ensure that China met its trading obligations.
But lawmakers did not appear impressed.
“We do not have a strategic, coordinated United States economic policy, that I can determine, with respect to China,” Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and the chairman of the committee, told him.
Mr. Baucus said he was particularly concerned about failure to enforce intellectual property rules. With the goal of promoting “indigenous innovation,” China has set product standards and procurement preferences that are a disadvantage to American workers, companies and technology, many economists believe. Mr. Geithner said some progress on those areas had come out of the bilateral talks, known officially as the United States-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue.
When Mr. Baucus said the United States was oriented toward process, while China was focused on results, Mr. Geithner replied, “China’s not going to become like the United States overnight.”
He added: “China still has a government that plays an overwhelming role in determining economic activity. As you said, there is still a broad range of practices that China pursues today that is designed to protect China’s workers and firms at the expense of China’s trading partners.”
The top Republican on the committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, criticized the administration’s decision to delay the release of a foreign exchange report in which the United States could find that China had manipulated its currency, the renminbi, keeping its value artificially low to stimulate exports.
The Treasury has not made such a finding since 1994, and successive administrations have avoided doing so, preferring instead to try to persuade China to let the renminbi’s value fluctuate.
“Is the Chinese government going to make a significant adjustment to its exchange rate, just because our Treasury Department held off on issuing this report?” Mr. Grassley asked. “I doubt it.”
He also suggested that the time had come for the United States to consider retaliation in some areas of trade. “If one of the major beneficiaries of the world trading system engages in a pattern of refusing to play by the same rules as everyone else, then we should reconsider the rules that we apply to that country,” he said.
Mr. Geithner pointed to new suggestions of willingness by China to allow appreciation of the renminbi, as it did from 2005 to 2008. “China has made it clear in public that they have decided to resume the reform — that’s the phrase they use — to resume the reform of their exchange-rate policy,” Mr. Geithner told Mr. Grassley, but added, “As you know, they clearly have not decided when and how they’re going to act.”
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, asked Mr. Geithner when he would “stop slow-dancing” and take stronger action. “Our constituents are getting angrier and angrier, and that is what, of course, is fueling this protectionist drive in this country,” he said.
And Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said that “if the current state of our China currency negotiations had a theme song,” it would be Maxine Nightingale’s rhythm-and-blues hit, “Right Back Where We Started From.”
Mr. Schumer vowed to press ahead with bipartisan legislation that would remove one of the stumbling blocks to a manipulation determination — a finding of intent. The bill would compel the United States to take action against a country whose currency was in “misalignment.”
Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a Maine Republican who has been on occasion a crucial swing vote, told Mr. Geithner that he had offered little more than “soothing words.”
“The test of these things is not what people say and it’s not how many meetings you have,” Mr. Geithner told her. “The test is what actually happens to the terms and conditions that U.S. companies compete on.”

zhiyi

又一轮扯皮会前的媒体施压。