Thursday April 3, 08:32 AM
US treasury secretary talks trade in China under shadow of Tibet
By Peter Harmsen
BEIJING (AFP) - China has urged the United States to support its position on the Tibet crisis, state media said Thursday, after US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expressed US concern over the Chinese crackdown.
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told Paulson to see through Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, and respect "truth" regarding the deadly protests, the Xinhua news agency reported.
"China hopes the US side will see clearly the true nature of the Dalai clique, respect truth and distinguish between right and wrong, understand and support the just position of the Chinese government and people," Yang said.
In a meeting with Paulson Wednesday, Yang explained Beijing's version of the Lhasa riots, Xinhua said, referring to anti-Chinese protests in Tibet's capital that turned deadly three weeks ago.
"(Yang) stressed that the measures taken by the Chinese government according to law had not only gained support from the Chinese people, but also won understanding and support from a majority of countries in the world," Xinhua said.
Paulson, the first high-level US official to visit Beijing since the Tibet protests began, raised the sensitive issue on Wednesday, the first day of a two-day trip to Beijing.
"As you might imagine, I expressed our concern about the violence and urged a peaceful resolution through dialogue," Paulson told reporters late Wednesday after meeting President Hu Jintao.
"I made that point, I felt, in a very appropriate way to the appropriate people," he added, but declined to say with whom he raised the issues.
US President George W. Bush had previously expressed concern in a telephone call to Hu about China's handling of the unrest.
Exiled Tibetan leaders say 135 to 140 people have died in the Chinese crackdown on the demonstrations. China insists it has acted with restraint and killed no one, while blaming Tibetan rioters for the deaths of 20 people.
Paulson is in Beijing to lay the groundwork for the next round of the cabinet-level US-China Strategic Economic Dialogue in June in Washington. He is to meet Premier Wen Jiabao on Thursday.
Although China may dislike having the Tibet issue raised in a forum dedicated to economic issues, local analysts said the momentum in the twice-yearly dialogue was unlikely to be affected.
"I think China will treat separately the talks on Tibet and the Strategic Economic Dialogue," said Han Xu, a Beijing-based political researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
For one thing, China's increasingly sophisticated diplomats are likely to understand very well the dynamics of US politics forcing Paulson to raise the Tibet issue on the trip, he said.
"It (Frankfurt: A0MLX5 - news) 's imaginable that the US administration is under quite big pressure posed by the Congress. It's a traditional style of US politics," said Han.
On economic issues, Paulson said he told Hu he considered the recent appreciation of China's currency, the yuan, to be "very material progress," but that Beijing was still a way from a market-driven currency.
The United States has been pushing China for a faster appreciation of the yuan, which was pegged to the dollar until July 2005 and now trades in a narrow band. It has appreciated about 18 percent since then.
"The Chinese are not ready to have a market determined currency," Paulson said.
US critics have long argued that the yuan has been undervalued, giving Chinese exporters an unfair advantage and contributing to China's massive trade surplus with the United States.
In Paulson's meeting with Hu, one of the other agenda items was the turmoil in the US financial markets.
"I would say there is no doubt that what is happening in US markets clearly has to give the Chinese pause. They may be too polite to say that directly, but it clearly has to be giving them pause," he said.
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