From Reuters:
A top U.S. Republican lawmaker on T hursday called on the Obama administration to negotiate an investment treaty with China and to increase pressure on the world's second-largest economy to make trade and currency reforms.
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Camp's call for the United States to begin talks with China on a Bilateral Investment Treaty, or BIT, comes one week before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner travel to Beijing for high-level talks.
It also follows the Obama administration's announcement last Friday that it had finished three years of internal deliberations on a so-called "model BIT," which will be used as a template for future negotiations.
That has raised expectations China and the United States could announce at the May 3-4 Strategic and Economic Dialogue meeting that they are relaunching negotiations on an investment treaty. The administration of former President George W. Bush began talks with China on a BIT, but they were put on hold after Obama took office in 2009.
"Business people have been telling the administration that this is important and that they have been waiting too long and they need to get moving on it," said Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, whose members include Boeing, Caterpillar and Microsoft.
Andrea Mead, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative's office, said the U.S.-China meeting provided "an opportunity to discuss next steps on our negotiations now that the United States has released its new model BIT."
A recent U.S. BIT with Rwanda passed the Senate without controversy. What will happen if the Senate considers a BIT with China?
