As top trade officials from the 21 members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum gathered in Montana for an annual meeting, Senate Finance Committee leaders released a report that estimated American companies lost $48 billion in China in 2009 due to piracy and counterfeiting.
The U.S. International Trade Commission report also said the United States could create as many as 2.1 million jobs if China more aggressively enforced U.S. copyrights, patents and trademarks on products ranging from software to pharmaceuticals to industrial designs.
"This report quantifies how extensive the damage is on the American economy. It shows the importance of negotiating strong intellectual property protections in trade agreements and enforcing those rights once the agreements are in place," said Republican Senator Charles Grassley.
Carol Guthrie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative's office, said "achieving meaningful progress" in reducing piracy and other forms of intellectual property theft in China was a top Obama administration priority.
The report underscored a letter on Tuesday from 28 senators calling for tough intellectual property provisions in the proposed TransPacific Partnership (TPP) pact between the United States and 8 other APEC countries: Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Chile, Peru, Singapore and Brunei.
U.S. business groups hope trade negotiators complete a framework for that agreement by the time President Barack Obama hosts APEC leaders in Hawaii in November.
The United States envisions the TPP accord could one day include all APEC members, including China.
In a speech at the trade ministers meeting in Montana on Wednesday, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke highlighted the importance of the APEC region to U.S. economic growth.
"Today, the Asia-Pacific is the most economically dynamic region in the world. Home to nearly 3 billion people, the 21 member economies represent about 54 percent of the world's GDP, and 44 percent of world trade," Locke said.
The United States already does about $2 trillion in trade with APEC members, but poor intellectual property rights protections prevent many small and medium-size U.S. companies from doing more business there, he said.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid urged the White House to insist on tough rules in the TPP on giant government-backed companies that he said are not subject to the same market forces as most companies in United States.
"Increasingly, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and state-sponsored enterprises (SSEs) acting on a non-commercial basis are squeezing out their market-based competitors," Reid said in the letter to White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley.
Reid did not mention China in the letter, but U.S. business groups say strong rules on state-owned enterprises in the TPP is one of many tools that could be used to help them compete with China's huge state-owned firms. (Reuters)
