Beijing, February 18:

China will buy more American-made produ-cts and crack down harder on people who steal intellectual property, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said today amid growing discontent in the US over a soaring trade deficit with Beijing.

“We are ready to expand our imports from the US to improve the trade imbalance,” said spokeswoman Jiang Yu. “At the same time, we hope the US can relax its controls on high technology to China.” China frequently complains that American export controls prohibited the transfer of high-technology products, thereby keeping some American goods out of China.

Jiang said at a regular press briefing that China is also in the process of improving its legal system to better deal with violators of intellectual property rights and will crack down harder on “IPR infringement activities so as to protect the intellectual property of all countries’ products in China.” The US government announced this week that its trade deficit set a record for a fifth consecutive year and the imbalance with China soared to $232.5 billion, the highest level ever for an individual country.

Jiang’s comments were in response to a question about a plan by a trio of US senators to introduce legislation that would strip China of its permanent normal trade status with the US and subject the trade relationship between the countries again to an annual review by Congress.

Democratic senators Byron Dorgan and Sherrod Brown and Republican senator Lindsey Graham said on Tuesday that revoking permanent trade status would give the US more leverage to force China to abide by global trade rules.

Congress granted China permanent normal tr-ade status in 2001 as part of the country’s membership that year in WT-O. Before that, Congress voted every year whether to continue normal trade relations. Jiang did not respond to the proposal.