He hoped the second negative list offers will have high quality and substantial improvement so that Xi and his counterpart Obama could confirm "major progress" made in BIT talks when they meet and give further clear instructions to both negotiating teams for concluding the talks. "Our objective is to conclude the China-U.S. BIT negotiations under Obama administration," Zhu said.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew also believed the upcoming Xi- Obama summit could inject new momentum to the BIT talks. "I think the fact that there's a leader's meeting happening will focus all of the efforts to make progress for that," Lew said Wednesday at a press briefing.
U.S.-China Business Council President John Frisbie shared the similar view. "Both governments should double their efforts to advance the negotiations on a bilateral investment treaty as much as possible before President Xi's state visit in September," Frisbie said in a statement. "A high-standard BIT, with strong provisions for market openings and equal treatment, would greatly benefit the commercial relationship."
"I think there's a 50 percent chance that the BIT will be concluded late this year or early next year. It all depends on Chinese willingness to agree on a short and specific negative list, " Gary Hufbauer, a former deputy assistant secretary for international trade at U.S. Treasury and a senior fellow at the PIIE, told Xinhua.
"However, President Obama will not send the BIT to Congress until TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) is ratified," Hufbauer said, referring to the Asia-Pacific trade deal, which covers 40 percent of the global economy and is nearing completion after more than five years of negotiations.
After weeks of fighting over the so-called fast-track trade legislation, U.S. Congress finally agreed this week to give the president authority to submit trade deals to Congress that cannot be amended, which could push forward the stalled TPP talks, a top priority of Obama's second-term economic policy.
The Obama administration wants to wrap up TPP negotiations in the next few months and bring the 12-country agreement to Congress for ratification by the end of this year, before the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign heats up.
Chinese officials have told the U.S. side that "we hope TPP negotiations will be concluded as quickly as possible," so that Washington can pay more attention to BIT negotiations with China, "because for any country the number of negotiators is limited," Zhang said.
Yukon Huang, a senior associate in the Asia Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said an agreement on the TPP would provide guidance on how the China-U.S. BIT might be approached and formulated, as SOE rules, arbitrary standards and other investment issues are covered in both TPP and BIT negotiations.
Huang said it is necessary to realize that both sides want to have a BIT, as it will help address a number of investment concerns between the two countries, and investors from both sides will get better access to each other's markets.
BIT is also very important for moving forward China-U.S. economic relations as "it is only the documentary agreement dealing with international economic issues between the United States and China in the foreseeable future," Huang told Xinhua.
