Members of the House of Representatives trade panel lashed out at Beijing over the US trade gap with China, which amounted to 124 billion dollars in 2003 and appeared to be growing in 2004.

In January alone, the US deficit with China came to 11.5 billion dollars, Commerce Department figures showed.

"A healthy bilateral trading relationship with deficits of this magnitude is not sustainable in the long term," warned the panel chairman, Republican representative Cliff Stearns.

Chinese piracy of US intellectual property cost the United States more than one billion dollars a year, Stearns told the panel, held in the run up to a US-China joint commission on trade from April 21-22.

"This is a real problem for US exports, and if remedied would help in balancing the US-China trade deficit," he said.

"In short, my colleagues, we are buying Chinese products, they are stealing many of ours."

Fellow Republican Fred Upton, representative for Michigan, said he supported free trade.

"However, with respect to China it does seem like something has gone awry. In fact, the playing field looks so uneven, I don't blame folks back home for wanting to plow it over," he said.

"Our trade deficit with China is beyond the point of acceptability," Upton complained.

The United States had expected China to stick to fair trade rules once it joined the WTO in December 2001, Upton said.

"It doesn't seem like that is happening when we watch jobs continuing to move there on a routine basis," he said.

Deputy US Trade Representative Charles Freeman said protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) in China appeared to be weakening.

"There's no getting around it: Intellectual property rights in China are not well protected. Enforcement of IPR is very, very lax, and piracy is absolutely rampant," Freeman said.

China had implemented the WTO agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) in 2001, but the actual level of piracy had increased, he said.