China's Wu "disappoints" Bush
May 24, 2007
reuters.com
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi on Thursday left President George W. Bush "disappointed" over Beijing's reluctance to open its markets and faced more complaints from the U.S. Congress about China's trade and currency policies.
Wu and her host, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, met Bush at the White House after two days of economic talks that produced scant accomplishments and stoked congressional anger at China's practice of keeping its yuan currency's value down.
U.S. lawmakers who had met Wu on Wednesday said they intend to move ahead with legislative measures, some of which propose levying duties on Chinese imports, to offset the "subsidy" effect of what they see as an unfairly cheap yuan.
Paulson is trying to persuade China to let its currency increase in value more rapidly but his diplomatic approach is losing favor with lawmakers who are out of patience -- a point that Bush apparently tried to drive home to Wu.
"One of the issues I emphasized to Madame Wu Yi ... was that we're watching very carefully as to whether or not they will appreciate their currency," Bush told reporters at a White House news conference.
Bush failed to win Wu over to reopening China's markets. "One area where I have been disappointed is beef," Bush volunteered to reporters after meeting with Wu.
"They need to be eating U.S. beef. It's good for them," he said. "They'll like it."
U.S. unhappiness over China's practice of managing its currency's value has overshadowed the many issues on the table -- from food safety to copyrights and air routes -- because it is seen as the root cause of a huge and growing U.S. trade deficits with China that hit a record $233 billion last year.
One hot issue, in the wake of reports of poisoned toothpaste and contaminated pet food, was what Beijing is willing to agree to in order to assure Americans they aren't physically endangered by Chinese products.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt on Thursday presented a list of steps Washington wants China to take, possibly to include a registry of Chinese firms permitted to sell food items to Americans, but got no immediate answer on whether China will agree.
Wu was also meeting U.S. Senate leaders on Thursday, as well as members of the Senate Finance Committee, whose chairman Max Baucus of Montana was certain to raise the sticky issue of China's refusal to allow imports of U.S. beef.
China stopped importing U.S. beef when mad cow disease surfaced in the United States in 2003. The World Organization for Animal Health, or OIE, announced on Tuesday that it now considered the United States as a "controlled risk" country for the feared bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow, a downgrading of its earlier assessment of the dangers.
The Chinese delegation, which kept its counsel throughout the two prior days of talks, sought on Thursday to counter the widespread impression the discussions had not gone well.
Chinese Assistant Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao met reporters to say the talks had concluded "successfully" and that the two sides "respected each other and listened carefully" to one another's views.
Zhu minced no words, though, in stating Beijing's "strong dissatisfaction" at the Bush administration's recent actions in filing cases against China before the World Trade Organization over copyright theft. He said the United States needed to acknowledge China's steps toward protecting such "intellectual property."
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... disappoints the decider?
LOL!
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Bird Shits on Bush During Press Conference
crooksandliars.com
"Seems a passing sparrow took an opportunity to weigh in on what the President had to say." |
