China and EU nod to talks on trade rules
Source: China Daily Date: 2007-09-21
China and the European Union agreed to kick off negotiations to improve the framework documents on bilateral economic and trade relationship, according to a senior trade official.
"The two sides have agreed to officially launch negotiations toward adjustment of the Sino-EU agreement on trade and economic cooperation inked in 1985," Yao Shenhong, a spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce, said on Wednesday.
The decision was made by Commerce Minister Bo Xilai and EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson in their latest meeting in Brussels.
The previous agreement was part of the legal framework on Sino-EU relations. Both China and the European economic bloc have undergone such significant changes in the past two decades that the current agreement is not enough to manage all the issues between the two.
Yao said the ministry will head the Chinese negotiating party but declined to give a detailed timetable of the negotiations.
The decision to launch the talks was among the over 10 consensuses reached by Bo and his EU counterpart. Others include new talks on steel trade, facilitating EU's exports to China and the EU's reopening of its market to Chinese poultry.
According to the European Commission, Bo and Mendelson reviewed bilateral trade relations discussing a wide range of issues, from textile, steel and intellectual property rights to China's market economy status.
Mandelson urged Beijing to address barriers to EU exporters and investors in the Chinese market and to protect EU businesses in China from intellectual property theft.
In its updated assessment on China's progress toward market economy status, the European Commission said China has met only one of the five technical criteria for the status.
In response, Yao said the EU "criteria" are too critical and the European Commission did not treat information from Chinese government and other sources equally in the assessment procedure. He added the EU side should assess China's efforts objectively and grant China the market economy status as soon as possible.
Coated paper
Yao said the US move to impose both anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Chinese coated paper is "self-contradictory".
He made the remark over the Bush administration's decision to apply countervailing duties on coated paper imports in March and levy preliminary tariffs on imports of coated paper from China, Indonesia and South Korea at the end of last month to make up for low-priced products "dumped" in the US.
The United States considered China's to be market economy in its countervailing assessment but not in its anti-dumping evaluation, Yao said. "We will monitor the development of the case and reserve the right to take appropriate measures to respond."
Trade surplus
China is poised to take further tax measures to help narrow its trade gap, according to Yao.
"In future, we will launch a series of measures to improve import and export tax policies to balance our trade," he said when asked whether further adjustments in tax rebates were expected.
China has recently reduced and scrapped tax rebates on a range of energy-intensive products and imposed taxes of between 5 and 10 percent on exports of more than 80 types of steel products. The buzz is that the government is proposing rebate reductions on a wider range of products.
