The China Daily Business Weekly said the United States has transferred most of its labour-intensive industrial sectors to developing countries, such as China, since it began concentrating on information technology.

``For the US, importing these low-end products is much cheaper than producing them by itself, since it has such an expensive labour force,'' the newspaper said, quoting vice- president Zhou Shijian of the China Chamber of Commerce for Metals, Minerals and Chemical Importers and Exporters.

Products made by US-funded ventures in China and sold on the Chinese market ``have to a certain extent cut the level of US exports; while if these businesses export their products back to the US, they are usually counted as imports from China,'' Zhou said.

Actual US investment in China has averaged $3.0 billion annually for six consecutive years since 1992, thenewspaper said.

Washington has said that China's trade surplus with the United Sates was likely to hit a politically sensitive $60 billion this year. But China's customs figures show that China registered a trade surplus of $17.4 billion with the United States in the first 10 months of this year, compared with $16.4 billion in the whole of 1997.

Analysts forecast China's trade surplus with the United States would hit $20 billion this year, the newspaper said.

In September the US department of agriculture announced that it would ban from December all Chinese exports packed with solid-wood crates and pallets as part of efforts to stem an infestation of a tree-killing beetle from China.

The Chinese press has published official criticisms that have branded the US move ``irrational'' and a back-handed way of trimming China's mushrooming bilateral trade surplus.

The ban would affect 25-50 per cent of all Chinese exports to the United States, according to US officials.

US-bound shipments leaving China onor after December 17 would be turned back or fumigated at high cost unless they had certificates stating they had been treated for the pest or did not contain solid-wood packing material.The Asian long-horned beetle, which has appeared in nearly 30 shipping warehouses around the United States, ignited a public frenzy when it was discovered chewing lethal holes in suburban New York and Chicago trees.Zhou said China's earnings from its trade surplus with the United States were far less than those indicated in customs figures.

``The majority of China's exports to the US belong to processing trade, for which Chinese exporters earn only a tiny processing fee,'' the newspaper quoted Zhou as saying.

More than 70 per cent of Chinese exports to the United States are processed from materials imported from countries like the United States, Japan and South Korea, the newspaper said.

Zhou urged the United States to end sanctions on high technology exports to China.

``Chinese enterprises do need to import advancedequipment from the US, but they are short of money,'' said Zhou, who also called on Washington to provide export credit to Chinese firms.