Trump to order probe into China's intellectual property policy

The executive memo Trump is expected to sign on Monday will direct U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to look into whether his office should open an investigation into China's trade policies and whether they abide by the U.S. Trade Act of 1974.

China has said that trade between China and the United States benefits both sides and that Beijing is willing to work with Washington to improve their trade relationship.

China is the North's biggest economic partner and source of aid, but says it alone can't compel Pyongyang to end its nuclear and missile programs. Lighthizer will recommend whether an official investigation into trade practices is warranted.

He simply will initiate the latest investigation of intellectual property theft in a long line of them running back through past administrations.

Michael Wessel, a commissioner on the U.S.

Trump will instruct his chief trade adviser on Monday to investigate allegations that China violated USA intellectual property rights and forced companies to share their technology in order to do business there, Politico reported. The Trump administration was expected to move directly into the investigation, so the memorandum reflects the more measured approach the administration also appears to be taking with steel and aluminum. While Trump officially withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama-era trade deal, and will begin talks next week to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, other planned trade measures have been slow to materialize. Meanwhile, 100 days of trade talks with the Chinese carried out in past months resulted in a few trade gains but not the ambitious changes the administration had hoped for.

Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a popular trade tool in the 1980s that has been rarely used in the past decade, allows the president to unilaterally impose tariffs or other trade restrictions to protect US industries from "unfair trade practices" of foreign countries. -China trading relationship. But analysts have cautioned that Trump faces a huge challenge in his desire to significantly reduce the US trade deficit with China, which previous year stood at more than $300 billion.

The process can bypass World Trade Organization procedures for adjudicating grievances.

"We would like to emphasize that the Chinese government has always attached importance to intellectual property protection", a spokesman said. Instead, he is leading the administration is dusting off a variety of powerful and unilateral measures under US trade law, many of which the United States stopped using after the creation of the WTO, which has its own mechanisms to settle trade disputes.

The people in at least one other country at the center of the tensions - South Korea - are definitely not feeling reassured by these statements.

Kennedy of CSIS says business leaders express a range of opinions, depending on how much they discrimination they face in China and how key Chinese profits are to their business.