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Sino-US textile frictions 'almost over'
By Jiang Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-11-08 06:13
China and the United States are close to an agreement on the textile
frictions, with hopes that the two-way textile trade situation will soon be
stabilized.
Anonymous US officials were quoted by AP (Associated Press) as saying that
the two countries had made agreements on certain principles at the seventh round
of talks on this issue, held last week in Washington.
They said the deal, similar to the one between China and the European Union
signed back in June, would govern China's textile exports to the United States
in the following three years. It is likely to allow exports to increase by 8 to
17 per cent annually and confirmation of this is hoped to come today.
"China made concessions on the duration of the limits while the United States
made concessions on the growth rate," said Sun Huaibin, the spokesman with China
National Textile and Apparel Council.
He said an agreement, which would give textile dealers a clear environment,
was much better than the safeguard measures the United States were adopting.
Under the safeguard measures, China's textile and garment exports to the
United States are only allowed to increase annually by 7.5 per cent.
Meanwhile, Sun said that there were still two major problems facing the
Chinese textile industry.
The agreement is expected to take effect from the beginning of next year, so
China must be cautious about how to deal with exports in the ensuing months
until then.
Millions of Chinese textile products piled up at European ports earlier this
year, as companies spared no effort to export as much as possible during a
"vacuum period" before the reached agreement took effect.
"It is also a serious problem to allocate quotas given by the United States
to domestic textile exporters," he said.
China's commerce ministry, the trade watchdog, is adopting a bidding method
in distributing some EU quotas and allocate the others to enterprises according
to their shipment in the last year.
However, the revealed information does not include the base for calculation,
said Cao Xinyu, vice- chairman of China's Chamber of Commerce for Import and
Export of Textiles.
"The lack of a base figure made it difficult to valuate the possible
agreement, as we cannot calculate the specific quotas for the coming years
without this figure," he said.
Under the possible agreement, China's textile exports to the United States
would be calculated according to a 12-month-textile-trade, which is regarded as
a base figure, and the agreed growth rate. So far, no formal comments were
available from the Chinese or the US Government.
The US Government launched safeguard measures against made-in-China socks
late last year upon the request of its domestic industry.
After the decade-long global textile quota regime was eliminated in January
this year, tension intensified between the two countries because the US side put
in place more curbs on Chinese textile products.
The Chinese textile industry said the frictions were a big blow to them since
their US customers declined to purchase from them the products under US
restrictions and shifted orders to some Southeast Asian countries.
(China Daily 11/08/2005 page10)
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