U.S. companies are crying foul over China’s oversight of monopoly and pricing issues, as antitrust enforcement threatens to further sour Sino-American business ties already damaged by a row over cyber espionage.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a private letter sent last month to Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, urged Washington to get tough with Beijing on its use of anti-competition rules, noting that “concerns among U.S. companies are intensifying.”
Beijing’s increasing use of its 6-year-old anti-monopoly law (AML) and price competition rules to weigh-in on global mergers and take action against foreign companies is set to further stoke tensions after Washington this week indicted five Chinese military officers with hacking U.S. companies to steal trade secrets.
The Chamber urged U.S. officials to use annual bilateral talks scheduled for July to “secure commitments from China” to address the issue, noting that efforts to compel China had been “insufficient.”
“There is significant risk to the U.S. economy that U.S. companies will increasingly be coerced into abandoning deals that would be good for markets and consumers because AML enforcement in China has no principled basis in competition law or economics and is informed by China’s industrial policy goals,” said the U.S. Chamber letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.
The U.S. State Department and U.S. Treasury Department declined to comment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce confirmed the letter.