Seattle – Chinese President Hu Jintao conceded Wednesday that “some problems have occurred” in the business ties between his country and the United States, but offered few if any specifics for solving them.
On the second day of his visit to Washington state, Hu was effusive and optimistic about the importance of trade to the future of both countries. At the same time, though, he announced no new proposals for cutting his country’s huge trade surplus with the United States, revaluing its currency, or limiting China’s oil purchases from countries such as Iran.
“The common strategic interests that bind our two countries together have not decreased; they have increased,” Hu said in luncheon remarks delivered before his flight to Washington, D.C., where he will meet today with President Bush. “The various areas for our cooperation have not narrowed; they have widened further.”
He noted that “given the rapid growth, sheer size and wide scope of our business ties, it is hardly avoidable that some problems have occurred.”
As for the most visible of those problems – China’s growing trade surplus, which soared to $202 billion last year – Hu explained it as mostly the result of “different industrial restructuring of our two countries and the accelerated international division of labor driven by economic globalization.”
He noted that at least 90 percent of U.S. imports from China are goods that are no longer made in the United States.
China has “worked hard,” he said, to cut the surplus by importing $6.7 billion in farm products from the United States last year and by committing to buy 210 Boeing Co. aircraft in the past two years.
Shortly before his speech – in a visit that seemed a symbolic response to critics of China’s trade surplus – Hu toured a Boeing plant north of Seattle, where he told workers that they have built two-thirds of China’s commercial airline fleet.
He said China will need 2,000 more planes by 2020.
