By Jeremy Page
BEIJING (Reuters) - On the eve of a crucial vote, China urged the U.S. Congress to grant it unconditional Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR), saying that was a mutually beneficial precondition to a bilateral WTO deal.
"We hope the U.S Congress can pass PNTR neatly and unconditionally as soon as possible," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue told a news conference on Tuesday.
"They should realize PNTR is not a favor granted to China by the U.S. side but is a matter of mutual benefit to China and the United States," she said.
The House of Representatives has been bitterly divided over the vote, scheduled for Wednesday, on whether to scrap annual reviews of China's trade status and permanently guarantee its goods the same low-tariff access to U.S. markets as products from nearly every other nation.
Passage in the U.S. Senate is virtually guaranteed.
Support grew last week after lawmakers reached an agreement to monitor China's human rights record.
But two out of every three House Democrats are still expected to vote against PNTR because of concerns the trade pact would set back human rights in China and cost hundreds of thousands of American workers their jobs.
Zhang said such fears were groundless.
"PNTR is in the interest of the United States and has nothing to do with human rights in China," she said.
"Passing PNTR will not only promote China-U.S. trade but will also create positive conditions for the long term healthy development of China-U.S. relations."
Granting PNTR was a prerequisite for a landmark November agreement between Washington and Beijing paving the way for China's entry to the World Trade Organization, she said.
Denying the trade status would not keep Beijing out of the body which governs world trade, but would only prevent U.S. businesses from benefiting from the deal, state media have warned.
Republican congressional leaders and the White House said on Monday that they were close to securing votes for passage of the deal despite stiff opposition from organized labor.
"We're on our glide path to where we need to be," House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, told Reuters.
President Clinton said his administration was "getting close." But he would not discuss the vote count, and cautioned: "We've got a lot of work to do. It's not done yet."
According to a Reuters poll released on Monday, the White House was still 26 votes short of the 218 needed for passage, with 192 lawmakers saying they would support or were likely to support PNTR, including 58 Democrats.:
