:28 TO UU.S. TRADE OFFICIAL TO PUSH CHINA ON COPYRIGHT LAWS
IJING (FEB. 27) UPI - A top U.S. trade official will urge China to beef up ws protecting copyrights and other ''intellectual property'' so as to avoid taliatory trade barriers, diplomats and business leaders said Wednesday.
team led by Joe Massey, assistant U.S. trade representative, was due in ijing late Wednesday for four days of talks on how the communist government ans to protect intellectual property rights.
ding gravity to Massey's visit are new U.S. figures showing an alarming crease in the U.S. trade deficit with China.
S. imports from China in 1990 soared 27 percent to $15.2 billion, more than iple what China bought from the United States, U.S. Embassy economists said. inese imports of U.S. goods fell 17 percent in 1990 to $4.8 billion.
e intellectual property issue is crucial to many Western firms in China and rticularly to vendors of computer software and integrated circuits whose signs are far easier to pirate than they are to develop in the laboratory.
S. business leaders said they expected Massey to lean hard on Beijing to dify certain international copyright protections as one means of alleviating le growing Sino-U.S. trade imbalance.
ina's first international copyright law, published last year, offers rtually none of the legal protections that are standard in much of the West, d draft regulations detailing how the law is to be implemented and enforced ve been shrouded in secrecy.
ny traders grumble that China's powerful Ministry of Foreign Economic lations and Trade has withheld the draft regulations out of fear they will t stand up to international scrutiny.
Massey is certainly here to transmit a warning to the Chinese that draft gulations must protect this, this and this, and that if they don't, here is at China can expect in response,'' said a U.S. trade lawyer based in Beijing.
S. diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. hopes to view the regulations closely and to influence subsequent drafts before their rmal promulgation this summer.
Massey's talks fail the U.S. trade representative can, at a minimum, place ina on a watchlist of countries with little or no protection of intellectual roperty rights. Tougher sanctions would include higher tariffs on Chinese
ports.
hina worries that the issue could inflame congressional debate over
S.-China ties, strained by the government-ordered Beijing massacre of June 89 that crushed China's pro-democracy movement.
stake in Congress is China's coveted low-tariff trading status as a 'most vored nation.'' Lawmakers already angry over what they regard as China's smal human rights record are likely to cite any major new trade friction as
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