The United States sees potentially escalating trade friction with China next year as Beijing is stepping up restrictions on foreign investment, a US trade official said today.
Franklin Lavin, US Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, said the United States's record trade deficit with China was not in itself a problem but that barriers to market access for US companies in China were.
"From the Department of Commerce's point of view a pure bilateral trade deficit is not intrinsically a sign of a problem," he said. "We look at market access: can US businesses fairly compete?"
It was uncertain how US-Sino relations would be affected by congressional elections in the United States last month, which gave the Democrats control of both the US House of Representatives and the Senate, he said.
China in the past two years had become much more ambivalent about the role of foreign direct investment in its economy and was becoming more selective and not always willing to let market forces work, Mr Lavin said.