This week, from June 22-24, senior Government officials from
the U.S. and China met in Washington for the seventh round of the “U.S.-China
Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED).”
The breadth of the topics covered borders on
mind-numbing.
As for the depth, well, they had a healthy 72 hours to cover
everything from military relations to anticorruption; from law enforcement to
disability rights; from counter-terrorism to humanitarian assistance; from
disaster response to maritime matters; from illicit nuclear and wildlife
transfers to climate change, energy, the environment and all things green; from
Ebola to satellite collision avoidance; from earthquake and volcano studies to Korea,
Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, Syria and Iraq.
Thankfully, they also found some time to chat about commerce
and trade-related matters, which took place within the so-called “Economic Track”
of the Dialogue, led, on the U.S. side, by the Treasury Department.
Yesterday, Treasury put out a fact sheet detailing the
outcomes (link: http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl0094.aspx).
Let’s peek at a highlight or two.
With respect to China’s recently introduced and worrisome information
and communications technology (ICT) regs in the banking sector (previously
blogged about, as linked here),
Treasury reported that “China committed
to ensure that such bank ICT regulations will be nondiscriminatory, are not to
impose nationally-based requirements, and are to be developed in a transparent
manner.
Further, per Treasury, “China
committed to enhance policy transparency in its governance of the ICT sector,
including providing opportunities for comment on draft regulations.”
And, on a related matter, specifically so-called “national
security reviews,” Treasury’s Fact Sheet offered that “we stressed
our strong concerns that China’s national security review is too broad in
scope, considers numerous issues that go well beyond genuine national security
concerns and expressly affords third parties an inappropriate role in the
review process.”
Nifty.
One can only hope that some Ministry in China will issue its
own Fact Sheet confirming that the U.S. too has committed to undo its blatantly
discriminatory barriers to select foreign-based ICT vendors, to reform and make
more transparent its absurdly opaque development and implementation of such
policies, as well as its willy-nilly use of “national security” to stymie
market access and investment.