贝儿最美的情书:US firms, China tangle again over contracts -...

来源：百度文库 编辑：九乡新闻网 时间：2024/04/28 02:15:05

US firms, China tangle again over contracts

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There's an old proverb in China: The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away—meaning, if you're a bureaucrat out in the hustings, you can pretty much forget about Beijing and do whatever you like.


U.S. companies are learning this the painful way.


Multinationals are again complaining to U.S. trade officials about a problem they thought was resolved months ago. When China's President Hu Jintao met with President Barack Obama in January, he agreed to cancel rules that required foreign companies to design their products in China if they hoped to sell to the government—essentially a forced technology transfer.


The government is still the big customer in China, and the rules, part of the country's new campaign to create "indigenous innovation," had caused great anguish in the foreign business community. No one wanted to give away technology just to win a contract.


They are letting provincial authorities do their own thing," adds an executive with a U.S. manufacturer. One province may accept his bid, he says, but another may reject it as not meeting China's requirement that innovation be done in China—the technology-transfer imperative. "You have to fight it in every province. It's like punching at a cloud."

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Many of these U.S. companies are keenly dependent on China for their growth and see the country increasingly inclined to favor local companies. China's goal isn't surprising: It wants to build its own national and global champions.


Robert Hormats, the State Department's top economic official, says procurement "will definitely be a topic" at high-level meetings with China in coming weeks. "I don't want to prejudge it, but we've heard from a number of companies that they're still having difficulty selling to government entities."


Still, it is a big country, and President Hu's commitment was made only in January. Chris Murck, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and based in Beijing, says, "It's too early to say the bureaucracy is stonewalling." Existing regulations first need to be rewritten to accommodate the agreement.


The bigger issue, Mr. Murck adds, is that this is just one piece of China's broader industrial policy, a large array of mostly new rules designed to speed the growth of national champions and foster home-grown innovation.

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The list is long: new patent laws that could make it easier to seize foreign innovation; the setting of standards that require products to be re-engineered to meet Chinese specifications; national-security initiatives that give preferential treatment to Chinese companies in several industries; limitations on market access for U.S. services companies; continued weak enforcement of intellectual-property rights.


"China is picking some of the wrong ways to innovate," says John Frisbie, president of the U.S.-China Business Council. "Companies will tell you they continue to grow in China. But at the same time, they are watching these trends and it's giving them concern."


Technology companies, where innovation is the stock in trade, are having a particularly rough slog. At the end of the day, China's slow-motion approach to enforcing the Hu-Obama agreement is just part of this larger trend, says an executive in Beijing with a U.S. tech company.


"China's interest in developing its own companies is just what it is," he concludes. "Everything else is on the fringes." (From WSJ)
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