China urges US to ease high-tech export curbs

Beijing, Jun 27: China today said it hoped the United States would ease its controls on exports of high-tech products to China, responding to reports Washington was planning to tighten such curbs.

''We hope the United States will adopt concrete measures to relax restrictions on high-tech exports to China, so as to better resolve the issue of the Sino-US trade imbalance,'' Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news conference.

The Financial Times said today that the United States was considering new proposals to tighten controls on high-tech exports to China, which were due to be made public soon.

The draft plan had already been presented to China's Commerce Ministry, the newspaper added.

China has in the past cited US curbs on high-technology exports to China as an important reason for China's growing trade surplus with the United States.

Commerce Minister Bo Xilai said in April that US technology exports to China had been growing only half as fast as the European Union's, which in turn were slower than those of Japan.

China's trade surplus last year came to 2 billion.

But Bo said that if exports from foreign-owned firms were stripped out, the surplus had been about 20 billion dollars to 30 billion dollars. Foreign firms generated 58 per cent of Chinese exports last year, he added.

REUTERS