The US made further claims of intellectual property theft against China at the World Trade Organisation on Monday, with pointed accusations from American officials being met with denials from Beijing.
The White House’s ambassador to the WTO, Dennis Shea, said that there was an unwritten rule of “forced technology transfer” for foreign companies setting up in China, who are often also coerced into partnerships with local, state-influenced firms.
“This is not the rule of law. In fact, it is China’s laws themselves that enable this coercion,” Reuters quote Shea as saying to the WTO. “China has made the decision to engage in a systematic, state-directed, and non-market pursuit of other (WTO) members’ cutting-edge technology in service of China’s industrial policy.”
Chinese ambassador Zhang Xiangchen emphatically refuted the claims, asserting that the US side had not provided a single piece of evidence to support their argument, which instead relied on a “pure speculation” and a “presumption of guilt.”