While Washington hailed efforts to stamp out illegal production of compact and video discs and CD-ROMS, he said, it wanted better enforcement of laws against distributing, selling and buying pirated items. The intellectual property rights issue has twice in recent years pushed the two to the brink of a trade war, though it has barely been mentioned during recent trade talks. According to Reuter's, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres's visit to Macau and China starting on Friday will focus on ties with China after the enclave's handover to Beijing. A Portuguese spokesman said the main idea is to open the door for the relationship after 1999, both in terms of political and economic ties. But Mao, chairman of the Unirule Institute of Economics and Consulting, a private think-tank, is skeptical such a Keynesian solution is wise.
Governments have no business being in investing.
The most important role of government in a market economy is to maintain market order and not to interfere with market rules. But Mao suggested that bureaucrats in Beijing were often not the best judges of how public money should be invested. Premier Zhu Rongji revealed this month that first quarter economic growth was just 7.5 percent, off the eight percent official target for the year. Moreover, industrial output rose by a disappointing 8.2 percent in the period. Economists have said China will need to maintain industrial output of 11 percent to hit its economic growth target this year.