The talks come in the sunset of George W. Bush's Republican presidency that has seen trade disputes with China over a host of issues, ranging from copyright infringement, automobile parts and investment barriers to toxic toys and pet food.

The latest attempt to get the World Trade Organization's Doha Round of negotiations off the ground foundered in July, leaving the world's largest economy and Asia's superpower squared off in their corners.

US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez and US Trade Representative Susan Schwab, the lead negotiator at the July Doha talks in Geneva, will host Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan for the one-day meeting Tuesday.

Gutierrez and Schwab will co-chair the talks with Wang, who is responsible for Chinese economic and trade matters. US Secretary of Agriculture Edward Schafer will also participate in the session.

The talks will focus on three main issues -- "market access, intellectual property rights and transparency," Commerce Department spokeswoman Ann Marie Hauser told AFP late Friday.

The meeting will mark the 25th anniversary of the US-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT), a bilateral dialogue the Commerce Department bills as an effort "to resolve bilateral trade issues to expand trade opportunities."

The silver anniversary venue fittingly is the Richard Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda in southern California.

In 1972, Nixon was the first US president to visit China since the People's Republic of China was established in 1949. The Republican president sought greater dialogue with the Communist nation, and that included trade.

The bilateral trade talks come amid longstanding US concerns about China's currency, the yuan, which critics say is kept undervalued, and its bulging trade surplus.

US officials repeatedly have raised the issue of the value of the yuan, which some say is artificially low and thus a factor in the massive trade imbalance between the two countries.

The United States is saddled with a ballooning trade deficit with China, which hit a record 256.2 billion dollars last year.

The yuan has appreciated by around 20 percent against the dollar since China delinked its currency from the greenback in July 2005.

Critics say China maintains its yuan currency undervalued to bolster exports, and US lawmakers blame outsourcing to China for the loss of thousands of jobs.

The US has lost four million manufacturing jobs in the past eight years, most of them in Bush's first term in office, Lloyd Wood of the American Manufacturing Trade Coalition (AMTAC) said Friday.

"We want China to play by the rules," Wood told AFP, citing the yuan and US trade complaints against China filed at the WTO.

Wood recalled with amazement that after the Republican-led Congress "got fired" two years ago, no legislation sanctioning China over its currency has been voted on.

"There's lots of blame to share on the issue," he added. "Our government is not doing anything."

Erin Ennis, vice president of the US-China Business Council, downplayed expectations for the JCCT talks, saying its jurisdiction "is fairly narrow."

"We're not expecting any major breakthroughs at this meeting," she said in a phone interview.

Asked about the political implications on US trade policy of a new president, either the Democrats' Barack Obama or the Republicans' John McCain, in the White House in January, Ennis took a long view.

The council does not expect a shift in the US approach to trade with China because it has been on a "steady footing for 30 years," she said.

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