Locke calls on Beijing to give US clean-energy companies greater market access

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US presses Beijing on clean-energy market access

BEIJING — Commerce Secretary Gary Locke pressed Beijing on Friday to give U.S. clean energy companies greater access to its market to help combat climate change.

Washington is looking to China’s booming market for wind, solar and other renewable energy to help fulfill President Barack Obama’s pledge to double exports and create 2 million jobs within five years. But Beijing is limiting access to its market, setting up a new trade clash amid disputes about currency, steel and other issues.

“American companies have the solutions that China needs,” Locke said in a speech to a business group. However he said, “too many government policies openly or implicitly discriminate against foreign firms.”

Locke is leading a trade mission of 24 U.S. companies to China to promote sales of clean-energy technology.

China was the biggest market for renewable energy technology last year but business groups complain Beijing favors its companies for government-financed projects and is pressing foreign suppliers to share technology.

Locke, a former governor of Washington state, invoked his heritage as an American of Chinese ancestry and said he wanted to see the two countries work together to combat climate change.

“I do not want the history books 100 years from now to say it was China that led the world to irreversible climate change,” Locke said at a lunch organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in China and the U.S.-China Business Council.

“I want the history books to instead say it was China and the United States working together in partnership that created a second industrial revolution for cleaner and more efficient technology,” he said.

Speaking to reporters later, Locke said that in meetings this week, he pressed Chinese officials on issues of “equal treatment” such as easing restrictions on foreign investment in offshore wind projects.

“The Chinese indicated to us that they were open and did not mean to restrict, so we will have to have follow-up on some of these issues,” he said.

Locke also expressed concern about Beijing’s “indigenous innovation,” which aims to build up Chinese technology industries through preferences in government procurement and other areas. The secretary said it still is too restrictive even after Beijing gave in to foreign complaints and promised in April to allow foreign companies with operations in China to qualify as domestic suppliers.

The policy “would effectively bar foreign participation in many of these projects,” Locke said.

China’s trading partners lack legal grounds to challenge the exclusion of their companies from government-financed energy projects because Beijing has yet to sign the Government Procurement Agreement, which extends World Trade Organization free-trading principles to public purchases.

China has promised to submit a fresh proposal by the end of this year for joining the treaty and Locke said Washington expects it to meet that deadline.