By Jonathan Peterson
March 15, 2000
Washington - Faced with mounting complaints about secrecy, the White House on Tuesday made public a key U.S.-China trade accord, a deal central to President Clinton's bid to grant Beijing permanent normal trading status with the United States.
The document, stamped ``unclassified'' on most of its pages, provides many details of China's pledge to throw open its market to a catalog of U.S. goods and services. The two countries signed the agreement in November.
Advocates of closer U.S.-China trade said the document is consistent with the administration's previous descriptions of the accord, adding more in the way of highly specific details than jarring surprises. They expressed relief that the White House had removed a veil of mystery that was fueling suspicions about the sensitive accord and putting members of Congress in an awkward position on one of the most emotional issues they will consider this year.
Lawmakers and some individuals with security clearances had been allowed to review the agreement behind closed doors, yet they were prohibited from sharing information about it, and it was off-limits to the general public.
The U.S.-China trade deal is a pivotal element in a series of maneuvers related to Beijing's goal of joining the World Trade Organization later this year. Until Tuesday, the White House had been keeping the text confidential in an effort not to bias talks related to China's bid to join the WTO. U.S. officials have said releasing the fine print might dissuade Beijing from granting even larger concessions to other trading partners, which would ultimately benefit the United States. In addition, such public disclosure departs from typical WTO protocol for many-sided negotiations.
Clinton administration and Chinese government officials have said that if Congress fails to grant Beijing permanent normal trade relations, China will in turn deny the United States the improved access to its market that it will give the rest of the world when it joins the WTO. ``I'm really pleased to see the text of this made available,'' said Rep. David Dreier, R-Covina. ``This makes the job of explaining the concrete benefits of bringing China into the rules-based trading system a little easier.''
In summaries for the public, the administration already had reported many key provisions of the pact. China has agreed, for example, to slash its tariffs on industrial imports from the United States to 9.4 percent in 2005, from an average of 24.6 percent in 1997. For many U.S. agricultural commodities, China has agreed to scale back tariffs to the 14 percent range, cutting them by more than half.
The administration also had disclosed that China would more than double the number of major movies it imports on a revenue-sharing basis to 20; allow 49 percent foreign investment in telecommunications services; and increase U.S. rights in such areas as insurance, tourism, engineering, and the underwriting of stocks and bonds.
Despite such summaries, however, the White House was under increasing pressure, in Congress and from the media, to eliminate any possibility that the document was different from official descriptions. Tuesday, the administration released page after page of columns, grids and tables, laying out the year-by-year tariff phase-downs for a dizzying range of products, from flashbulbs to pingpong balls, swords to grand pianos, feather dusters to ``unbleached plain cotton weave.''
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