US and Chinese negotiators are set Monday to hold the latest round of bruising talks on how best to dam a torrential flow of clothes from China that is said to be swamping the US textiles industry.
The two-day meeting here will see a face-off between delegations led by David Spooner, the chief US negotiator on textiles trade, and Lu Jianhua, director general at China's Department of Foreign Trade.
"We continue to seek a broad textile agreement with China. Such an agreement would provide both our manufacturers and retailers with much-needed certainty," Spooner said earlier this month.
"The United States, though, will continue to utilise the China textile safeguards when circumstances warrant," he warned.
The United States wants an overarching agreement to limit Chinese textile exports, which have rocketed since global quotas on the trade were lifted on January 1.
Over the past seven months, Chinese apparel exports to the United States have surged by 850 million items, an average increase of 627 percent, the US textiles industry complains.
Nearly 400,000 US textile and apparel manufacturing jobs - 38 percent of the total - have been lost since 2001, primarily due to a flood of subsidised Chinese clothes, it alleges.
US textile associations have filed a barrage of petitions with the government demanding new quota limits to stem the tide of Chinese garment exports. Authorities have looked favourably on most of the petitions so far.
The US industry's anger has grown since the last round of textiles talks, in Beijing, ended without agreement at the start of the month. China was accused of taking a hard-line approach that nixed any hope of compromise.
The textile groups deny that the US clothes industry risks replicating a crisis that hit the European Union in recent weeks when millions of Chinese garments were impounded at EU ports because they breached quota limits.
Many of the garments had already been ordered by European importers before the EU and China reached an agreement in June to control their textiles trade.
The importers were given no warning of the June agreement and it was too late to find suppliers from other countries, the US industry says.