China governance system faulted in U.S. toy debate
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Most U.S. lawmakers and safety experts saved their best shots for American inspectors in a hearing on hazardous Chinese toys on Wednesday, but a few took aim at the communist system they said lay behind recent alarming recalls of toys.
China itself was under fire during the Senate subcommittee hearing attended by Beijing's top product safety official as well as Mattel Inc CEO Robert Eckert and the head of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
"I firmly believe that the problems we're now seeing with Chinese-made toys and other consumer products is just a symptom of a much larger problem that must be dealt with in a swift and vigorous way," said Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback.
Brownback, a longshot candidate in the Republican Party presidential primary race, then turned from toys to Senate complaints about the value of China's currency, its huge trade surplus and foreign policy complaints about Beijing.
"As hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars flow to China every year, China, in turn, sends support to bad actors around the world, like Iran, Sudan, Burma, Zimbabwe and North Korea," said the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government.
"As we know, these are dictatorships which commit acts of genocide and promote terrorism," Brownback added before returning to the hearing subject, which was lead paint in Chinese toys.
A consumer safety expert whose main target was shortcomings by U.S. firms and monitoring agencies also took a swipe at China.
"China suffers from the absence of a rigorous regulatory system, an endemic problem of corruption and a lack of a free press," Sally Greenberg, senior product safety counsel at the Consumers Union, told the subcommittee.
Those problems, she said, made it "crucial that American companies doing business in China undertake third-party independent inspections and set up certification systems."
The U.S. government has avoided linking the product safety scare to trade or political issues with China, whose cooperation Washington needs on a range of diplomatic and security issues. China's trade surplus with the United States is on track to surpass last year's record $233 billion.
However, the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Banking Committee passed bills in July giving the Bush administration new tools to prod Beijing to reform a currency policy that many lawmakers believe keeps China's currency undervalued by as much as 40 percent.
