US President George W. Bush's administration wants China to crack down on the rampant piracy of US movies, music and computer programs and will not be satisfied until copyright violators get stiff prison sentences, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans said.
Evans, who was leaving on his fourth and final trip to China as a member of Bush's Cabinet yesterday, said in an interview that he wanted to learn firsthand what China was doing to fulfill promises to better enforce its intellectual property laws.
Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi (
The Motion Picture Association estimates that its members lost up to US$3.5 billion last year from movie pirates. China is considered the second worst offender behind Russia.
Evans said even though the Chinese government had committed to specific steps to combat piracy, the US was concerned about the lack of significant criminal prosecutions.
He said the administration wants to see "jail time and tough criminal actions against those responsible for the thefts. ... We haven't seen enough evidence that this is happening yet."
Evans said he would emphasize this point during meetings with Chinese leaders and in a speech on Thursday at an intellectual property conference in Beijing.
During Bush's second term, the US will keep the pressure on China to abide by the market-opening commitments it made upon joining the WTO, Evans said.
That effort, he said, will continue under Carlos Gutierrez, the president's nominee for commerce secretary. The head of cereal giant Kellogg is awaiting Senate approval to take over for Evans. Evans said in November he was leaving the Cabinet to return to Texas.
Gutierrez told lawmakers last week that the administration intended to press China to narrow the trade gap with the US. That imbalance hit US$124 billion in 2003, a record for any US trading partner, and widened last year.
Critics of the administration's trade policies contend that Bush has not done enough to protect US workers from unfair trade practices in other nations.
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs official yesterday said that a delegation that visited China for an APEC meeting did not receive any kind of treatment that downgraded Taiwan’s sovereignty. Department of International Organizations Director-General Jonathan Sun (孫儉元) said that he and a group of ministry officials visited Shenzhen, China, to attend the APEC Informal Senior Officials’ Meeting last month. The trip went “smoothly and safely” for all Taiwanese delegates, as the Chinese side arranged the trip in accordance with long-standing practices, Sun said at the ministry’s weekly briefing. The Taiwanese group did not encounter any political suppression, he said. Sun made the remarks when
The Taiwanese passport ranked 33rd in a global listing of passports by convenience this month, rising three places from last month’s ranking, but matching its position in January last year. The Henley Passport Index, an international ranking of passports by the number of designations its holder can travel to without a visa, showed that the Taiwan passport enables holders to travel to 139 countries and territories without a visa. Singapore’s passport was ranked the most powerful with visa-free access to 192 destinations out of 227, according to the index published on Tuesday by UK-based migration investment consultancy firm Henley and Partners. Japan’s and
BROAD AGREEMENT: The two are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff to 15% and a commitment for TSMC to build five more fabs, a ‘New York Times’ report said Taiwan and the US have reached a broad consensus on a trade deal, the Executive Yuan’s Office of Trade Negotiations said yesterday, after a report said that Washington is set to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent. The New York Times on Monday reported that the two nations are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent and commit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to building at least five more facilities in the US. “The agreement, which has been under negotiation for months, is being legally scrubbed and could be announced this month,” the paper said,
RSS