US, China Swap More Tariffs

The US has been a complainant in 93 out of the 400 or so disputes registered with the World Trade Organization in its 15-year history, the most of any nation, Reuters said Friday. Through the end of 2009, only India had more active antidumping and countervailing-duty measures than the US, it said.

Tensions seem to have mounted between Beijing and Washington due to wrangling over issues including the value of the yuan, US arms sales to Taiwan and a scheduled meeting between President Obama and the Dalai Lama, who is viewed by Beijing as a Tibetan separatist.

The Obama administration drew Beijing's ire by threatening a "much tougher" enforcement of existing trade rules.

The US and China were also in dispute over the latter's Internet policy, after Google threatened to pull out of the country, accusing Beijing of backing official cyber attacks on the e-mail accounts of Chinese activists.

Wang Fan, an international affairs expert with the China Foreign Affairs University, said Sino-US relations are one of the most important bilateral relations in the world.

"The relation is so complicated that new conflicts continue to emerge while the existing ones are yet to be solved," Wang said.

However, with their expanding common ground, the two countries wouldn't fall into a "cold war," Wang said.

"Relationship between China and the US will always be somewhere between perfect and the worst. That is to say not as good as in the so-called scenario of the Group of 2, nor as bad as any sort of new cold war," Wang said.

Niu Xinchun, a researcher at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said China and the US should avoid a showdown despite the non-stop frictions.

"Conflicts will be accompanied by cooperation," Niu said. "The Obama administration would balance its attempts to contain China and its willingness to cooperate with it."

At the Munich Security Conference, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said a more developed China is an opportunity rather than a threat to the world.

"The argument that a strong nation is bound to seek hegemony finds no supporting case in China's history and goes against the will of the Chinese people," he said.

The WSJ called "a cheap currency, regulated interest rates and low energy prices" part of China's strategy, and that it is "stoking discontent in fellow developing countries, not just in Western capitals."

The export resurgence has reached into new markets, the WSJ said. A majority of China's exports now go to other developing countries, with exports to India, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico growing by 30 to 50 percent in recent months, the WSJ reported, citing figures from China International Capital Corp.