Global Policy Forum

Elizabeth Becker

In the face of growing international pressure, Chinese officials told top United States officials on Friday that they would continue to push ahead with plans to float or revalue their currency, but avoided giving a date to begin the transformation. This commitment fell short of the immediate action recommended this week by the International Monetary Fund and of the demands being made by Democrats and Republicans alike. Some academic experts see reasons for China not to revalue. After a day of meetings, the Group of 7 industrial nations failed to agree on a program to give full debt relief to impoverished nations despite growing support for a British proposal to use gold reserves at the International Monetary Fund to underwrite the program.

Pressure has been building for the Chinese to announce a change at the meetings here of the I.M.F. or at meetings with representatives of the G-7 who met with China for the first time at a dinner on Friday. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said afterward that he told the Chinese that "we want the pace to accelerate.'' "We're not satisfied, you know," Mr. Snow said, "but I think we do have to acknowledge progress is being made.''

Like the United States, the other members of the Group of 7 - Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan - have all said that continued, stable global economic growth requires China to relax its currency exchange rate immediately. The dinner invitation has been seen as the first step for China's eventual inclusion in the group. And a senior Treasury official said after the dinner that the G-7 would have more engagements with China. In return, the industrialized world is hoping the Chinese will begin to adopt a more flexible currency exchange rate and start to right what is seen as an imbalance in global currency rates that has hurt Europe as well as the United States.

Admission to the Group of 7 would be the final confirmation that China's economic growth has lifted the country to the center of the global elite. The only Asian country in the group is Japan. But in what is becoming a familiar ritual, China's first response on Friday was a joint communiqué promising greater efforts, but no timetable. "The Chinese side reaffirmed China's commitment to further advance reform and to push ahead firmly and steadily to a market-based flexible exchange rate,'' the two nations said in the communiqué. The statement was issued after the Treasury secretary, John W. Snow, and the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, met with Jin Renqing, the Chinese finance minister, and Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the central bank of China.

James Mann, a China expert and visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies, said the Chinese had used this strategy for decades to avoid improving their policies on human rights in Tibet, missile nonproliferation and protecting intellectual property rights. "They have a long track record of diverting attention away from doing something now or immediately by arriving at the beginning of a meeting and announcing what they plan to do way off in the future,'' Mr. Mann said. "Sometimes, in the end, they may actually do it."

Changing China's currency has become a focal point for those worried about the record United States trade deficit and the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas. This week senior Democratic lawmakers led by Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan filed a petition in advance of this weekend's meetings asking the administration to sue China at the World Trade Organization. The suit would contend that China's current inflexible exchange rate, 8.28 yuan to the dollar, amounts to unfair trading practices. By pegging its currency to the dollar, China has kept the prices of its exports low and flooded the American market with cheap goods while keeping the price of imports high, choking competition, the lawmakers charged.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, wrote a letter with Mr. Levin to the administration on Friday to complain that it had "once again failed to address in a meaningful way this issue that is so vital to American businesses, workers and farmers.'' At the opening of the I.M.F. meeting here on Thursday, Rodrigo Rato, the new managing director, argued that it would be in China's best interest to float its currency immediately. Reform is always easier when times are good, and China is enjoying extraordinary growth, he said. Moreover, a currency revaluation could help damp the possibility for inflation and cool the economy if it goes into overdrive again.

But some academics cite reasons that may make China reluctant to revalue. Prosperity has created a huge division between the rich and poor in China and created a political problem for the Chinese Communists who have promised that economic growth will benefit the country as a whole. "China has to worry about the impact a revaluation of the yuan will have on the poor, mobile population that work in the factories that depend on exports," said Nayan Chanda, Asian scholar and director of publications at Center for the Study of Globalization at Yale.

Several relief agencies issued statements of disappointment after the G - 7 failed to agree on debt relief. "It is a real shame that the richest nations were divided over how to cover the minimal cost of impoverished country debt to wealthy creditors like the I.M.F. and the World Bank, '' said Marie Clarke, of Jubilee USA network.