Many are interpreting this move as another push by the Obama administration to push China on trade.

President Barack Obama has chosen Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to succeed Jon Huntsman as U.S. ambassador to China – signaling a more focused White House effort to press Asia’s emerging economic superpower on trade issues, according to administration officials.

Obama could make the announcement as soon as Tuesday, a senior administration official said, adding that the president has yet to settle on a list of possible replacements for Locke, a former two-term governor of Washington. Locke’s departure from the cabinet had long been rumored.

Locke, 51, is a third generation Chinese-American with roots in Hong Kong and China’s coastal Guangdong province – and the first person of Chinese ancestry to serve as a U.S. governor. He is fluent in Cantonese and didn’t speak English until he was five years old.

This will be a huge campaign issue, and any progress will help the Obama administration. It will be interesting to see how the Chinese respond.

It’s obvious to most people that China isn’t playing fair on global trade, but few people can get to the heart of the problem like Robert Samuelson. He describes how China uses tactics like subsidies, currency manipulation and technology transfer to gain advantage. Then he closes:

It’s important to make several qualifications. First, Americans shouldn’t blame China for all our economic problems, which are mostly homegrown. Indeed, the ferocity of the financial crisis discredited U.S. economic leadership and emboldened China to pursue its narrow interests more aggressively than ever. Second, the point should not be (as Chinese allege) to “contain” China’s growth; the point should be to modify its economic strategy, which is predatory. It comes at others’ expense.

The U.S. response has been mostly carrots — to pretend that sweet reason will convince China to alter its policies. Last week, Presidents Obama and Hu exchanged largely meaningless pledges of “cooperation.” Alan Tonelson of the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a group of manufacturers, says U.S. policy verges on “appeasement.” We need sticks. The practical difficulty is being tougher without triggering a trade war that weakens the global recovery. Still, it’s possible to do something. The Treasury could brand China a currency manipulator, which it clearly is. The administration could move more forcefully against Chinese subsidies. America’s present passivity encourages China’s new world order, with fateful consequences for the United States and everyone else.

I think the current administration is in a bind, as the economic crisis has made it much more difficult to take a hard line with China and risk a trade war. Perhaps President Obama can reset the relationship and alter China’s behavior. If not, he will soon need to get tough with them.

Here’s an interesting article on Barack Obama’s trip to Indonesia and the issue of how that country straddles its relationship between the United States and China.

Bribery is a serious problem in China, but BusinessWeek reports that U.S. prosecutors, along with their Chinese counterparts, are stepping up enforcement.

U.S. prosecutors, empowered by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) to investigate allegations of bribery anywhere in the world, have been stepping up their activities in China, where a tradition of gift-giving in business often degenerates into serious graft. The FCPA bans U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials. It also applies to foreign companies like Siemens that list their securities on U.S. exchanges. Companies that violate the FCPA face millions in fines, and executives can go to prison. U.S. authorities have upped the number of bribery cases they pursued to a resolution around the world, from 11 in 2005 to 34 last year, according to Trace International, a nonprofit anti-bribery group based in Annapolis, Md. In a report released June 17, Trace pointed out that China, with 25 cases completed since enactment of the FCPA, fell behind only Iraq and Nigeria for the most international corruption prosecutions. Citing a World Bank estimate that more than $1 trillion in bribes are paid each year, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on May 31 called “combating corruption one of the highest priorities of the Department of Justice.”

Chinese prosecutors, meanwhile, are getting more aggressive under their own antibribery laws, says Patrick M. Norton, a partner with Steptoe & Johnson who focuses on international mediation.

Slowly but surely, the game is changing.

After months of subtle pressure from the United States and other nations, China has signaled a willingness to adjust its currency policies.

China’s central bank announced on Saturday evening that it would allow greater flexibility in the value of the country’s currency, in the clearest sign yet that China will allow the renminbi to appreciate gradually against the dollar.

The People’s Bank of China said that the Chinese economy was strengthening after the global financial crisis and that it was “desirable to proceed further with reform” of the currency, known as the renminbi or yuan. The announcement comes a week before world leaders gather in Canada for the Group of 20 and Group of 8 summit meetings. A growing number of countries have been calling for China to let the renminbi appreciate, including not just the United States and European nations, but India, Brazil and Singapore in recent weeks.

This is big news. For years China has kept its currency artificially low vs the dollar. Now we might see an adjustment that let’s the market have more of an impact on the value of the currency, which can help with the China/US trade deficit.