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http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/26/news/senators.php

A weeklong trip to China by two U.S. senators sponsoring a trade bill targeting China's currency has revealed differences between them, the latest in a series of signs that they are less likely to press for a vote in the Senate in the week ahead.

Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, have introduced legislation that would impose a 27.5 percent tariff in two years on all imports to the United States from China unless Beijing officials allow "substantial" appreciation in their country's currency.

After a week of meetings with officials in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, Schumer and Graham both said in an interview in Hong Kong Saturday that they remained committed to advancing the legislation unless China stopped intervening in currency markets and allowed its currency, known as the yuan, or renminbi, to move higher.

But the senators also said that Schumer had been more impressed than Graham by promises from Chinese officials to liberalize their currency policies, although those promises included no timetable.

Asked whether the newest development from the trip was the emergence of some differences between the two sponsors of the bill, Schumer replied, "That would be fair."

Schumer said that his views on China's trade and monetary policy had evolved as a result of the trip and that he believed the Chinese were taking steps to let the market determine the value of their currency.

"I'm convinced they do want to get there, which I wasn't a week ago," he said, adding that Graham was more skeptical.

Graham took the same tone he has taken for months on the issue. "The status quo is devastating to industries back home," he said.

South Carolina's textile industry has been hit hard by Chinese competition, and its nascent auto parts industry, which has grown up around the BMW factory near Spartanburg, is beginning to face Chinese competition.

The practical implications of the senators' differences may be limited for now. Graham said he wanted to see the results of President Hu Jintao's visit to the White House in late April and what the Treasury Department decides in its review at the end of April of whether China manipulates its currency.

That suggests Graham is also willing to take a wait-and-see approach and will not press for a vote in the next five days.

Both senators said they had not made a final decision on whether to follow through on their previous threats to force a vote in the Senate by Friday and would wait to do so until after further discussions in Washington with Treasury officials and others.

But differences between the senators could affect policy later, especially if Chinese officials keep up their recent tilt toward slightly more conciliatory rhetoric.

Currency traders around the world have followed every remark by the senators in the past week with rapt attention, especially as China has allowed its currency to creep up slightly faster in the past three weeks, possibly because of pressure from the senators.

Governments across the rest of Asia have been reluctant to allow their currencies to rise against the dollar as long as the yuan remains low, for fear of losing exports to China. But a strengthening of the yuan could prompt the monetary authorities from Tokyo to Singapore to allow appreciation.

The United States is importing almost $6 worth of goods for every $1 of goods it sells to China.

The Chinese government bought $206.7 billion worth of foreign currencies last year, mainly dollars, to slow the yuan's rise in value against other currencies.

That extensive intervention made Chinese goods less expensive in foreign markets than they would have been without the intervention, and made U.S., European, Japanese and other imported goods more expensive in China.

China allowed the yuan to appreciate by 2.1 percent on July 21, and the currency has very gradually appreciated by another one percent since then.

At a news conference Saturday at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong, both senators also addressed a controversy over whether Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong Kong company, should be allowed to win a contract to screen shipping containers in the Bahamas for any sign that they are being used to send nuclear materials to the United States.

Schumer praised the port in Hong Kong for screening all containers bound for the United States, with the help of a dozen U.S. customs officials here, and said that his main concern in the Bahamas was that U.S. customs officials be allowed to supervise the screening there, and not which company performed the screening.