Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Tuesday that his country’s relations with the United States have hit a snag again, adding that the U.S. needs to “remove all unreasonable restrictions.”
“China-U.S. relations today have once again come to a cross road,” Wang said at a dinner co-hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and The US-China Business Council. “While China opens wider to the U.S. and the rest of the world, we expect the U.S. to do the same to China and remove all unreasonable restrictions.”
He added that China’s efforts to reform and its opening up “should not be deliberately ignored or denied.”
Wang’s comments come as Washington and Beijing continue to struggle to overcome differences in their wide-ranging trade war and defuse tensions, CNBC writes. The U.S. has complained that it lacks equal access to the Chinese market and lamented the trade deficit with the world’s no. 2 economy.
Foreign companies have said on multiple occasions that they are forced to transfer key technology in order to operate in China. Access, likewise, is not even. Mastercard and Visa could not for year enter the Chinese market, and all the while Chinese UnionPay expanded on a global scale.
Google search, for instance, is unavailable altogether in the country.
But for the past two years, China has been making efforts to ease access to foreign industries, including securities brokerages and passed a new foreign investment law to improve intellectual property protection and curb forced technology transfers.
Greater access to the Chinese market remains the top priority for the U.S. in order for any trade deal to be reached, a survey from the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai shows.
The sides are to hold high-level trade negotiations early next month in Washington, D.C. Wang stressed that he hoped the talks will yield positive results, pointing to the significant business opportunity for America in working with China.
“The trade frictions between China and the U.S. in the last year have inflicted losses on both countries, losses that should not have happened,” Wang said, noting both sides should “explore new areas of cooperation.”
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