US decries weak Chinese currency ahead of talks

The United States has called on China to let its currency appreciate against the US dollar.

China’s yuan rose slightly against the dollar on Monday, ahead of a key US-China dialogue, but gains were capped by a weaker midpoint, traders said.

Spot yuan stood at 6.2005 per dollar by midday, up 0.08 percent from Friday’s close, although the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) set its midpoint at 6.1658, 0.03 percent softer than Friday.

Half-dozen US Treasury officials are travelling to Beijing for trade talks with their Chinese counterparts this week.

Sharon Yuan, Taiwan-born head of the Treasury Department’s trade and investment policy, and her colleagues are pressing China to quicken its economic opening and increase the value of its currency.

“How China implements its reforms will matter greatly to the United States and our ability to compete on a level playing field,” Yuan, 37, said in an interview, as reported by Bloomberg.

She said a good outcome in Beijing talks would be “to make as much incremental progress as we can” and put “some flesh on the bones” of China’s pledge to move toward a more market-oriented economy.

Having suffered from an economic downturn, the United States is struggling to access Chinese markets to shore up its own economy.

“The most important issue for the US is that China still has a lot of markets that are closed to exports, and probably more important, to foreign investment — in sectors like financial services, media and telecom,” said David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who was based in Beijing for the Treasury from 2009 to 2013.

Meng Meng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said China’s economy has been open enough in the past 30 years.

“China is already quite open to the US, and the speed of further opening up is not low, but the expectation from US is for something relatively high,” he said.