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U.S., China agree on textile imports

Paul Blustein Washington Post

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration has a tentative agreement with China on imports of Chinese clothing and fabric, a deal that would resolve a festering dispute between the two nations, industry sources said Friday.

Although a few details remain to be resolved, the agreement is likely to be signed next week by U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman and Chinese Commerce Minister Bo Xilai, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had learned the details from administration officials at a confidential briefing.

The deal would begin Jan. 1 and last through 2008 – a concession by China, which wanted it to expire in 2007. It would allow imports of most major textile and apparel products from China to increase by 8 percent to 10 percent in 2006, by 13 percent in 2007 and by 17 percent in 2008 – a concession by the United States, which had proposed keeping annual growth close to 7.5 percent.

Other economic disputes between the two countries – regarding copyright infringement and China’s currency – are unresolved. But, if approved, the textile agreement would ease U.S.-China tension over the issue, which became inflamed early this year when shipments of Chinese T-shirts, jeans, underwear and many other such products soared at rates near 1,000 percent over the previous year’s levels.

Imports surged suddenly because global trade in textiles and apparel was supposed to become much more free this year, like the trade in other goods such as electronics and automobiles. On Dec. 31, 2004, a global arrangement expired that for more than three decades had strictly limited the amount of textiles that individual countries could ship to the United States, the European Union and other major markets. Many experts predicted that China’s low-cost, efficient factories would soon dominate the world’s trade in clothing, bedding and other fabric products – a prospect that threatened tens of thousands of jobs in other developing countries and caused alarm in the battered U.S. textile industry.