No special hurdle for Chinese deals, Locke says

Chinese firms have no special hurdle to surmount in acquiring assets in the United States, said Gary Locke, the US ambassador to China.

Neither was there a different level of scrutiny applied to deals involving state-owned enterprises from that in the case of privately owned companies, he said.

Locke's comments yesterday were in response to concern expressed by mainland officials about what they deem as unfair foreign investment policies in the US after a few high-profile acquisitions proposed by state-owned enterprises failed to pass the US national security review.

Speaking at the forum on Monday, China International Capital Corp chairman Jin Liqun said Chinese firms had "honest objectives" in their efforts to acquire overseas assets, but political suspicions remained the biggest barrier to getting deals done.

Locke, apparently aiming to ease such concerns, told an international audience at Tsinghua University that one of his top priorities as ambassador was promoting and facilitating Chinese investments in the US.

"A vast majority of foreign investments from all countries, including China, do not raise national security concerns," he said.

From 2009 to 2011, only 269 of the more than 3,800 foreign mergers and acquisitions in the US were reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), of which only 20 involved Chinese firms, Locke said. About 92 per cent of the 269 deals were approved without any conditions.

Locke said the CFIUS focused "exclusively" on national security concerns linked to strategically sensitive sectors.

"CFIUS applies the same rules to all companies seeking to invest in the US, regardless of which countries the companies are headquartered in, the economic sector of the investment and whether the companies are state-owned or privately held," he said.