WASHINGTON - The Republican and Democratic parties have to work together to fix the economy during the incoming 112th Congress but to boost exports and create jobs, lawmakers may place more pressure, at different points, on China to address trade issues.

Thanks in part to the United States' battered economy, the GOP rode a wave of discontented voters to capture control of the House of Representatives in the November midterm elections. It gained 63 seats in the House. Republicans will hold a 242 to 193 majority in the House when the new Congress convenes Jan 5. In the Senate, Democrats hold a slim majority.

Still faced with sagging unemployment rates and a slower-than-expected economic recovery as well as a presidential election in two years, Congress - with Republicans having gained in power - will focus less on social issues, political analysts said.

And that likely means the new Congress will raise more pressure on trade with China, the largest supplier of US imports of goods and the third largest market for US exports in 2009, after Canada and Mexico.

To reduce the massive trade deficit with China and export more goods globally, US lawmakers of the 111th Congress have pressed hard on the Chinese government about the renminbi, intellectual property rights (IPR) protection and industrial policies.

Last year, the two chambers held several hearings on the Chinese currency. The House passed a currency bill in late September by a vote of 348-79. The bill addressed concerns that China undervalues its currency from 15 percent to 40 percent to give Chinese companies a price advantage in international trade. The bill gave the Commerce Department's authority to treat currency undervaluation as a subsidy under US trade law so that companies could apply for offsetting countervailing duties against imports from China on a case-by-case basis. The Senate failed to approve the bill and it has been killed.

In the coming new session of Congress, experts predicted that currency, trade surplus and rare earth metals will become major sources of friction between the two major economic powers.

But some analysts are already softening the intentions of the new Congress. Unlike the previous Democratic-led House, said Derek Scissors, from the Heritage Foundation, a think tank, the Republican-led House will have a different approach to address the trade surplus with China.

"It is very unlikely to be as obsessed with the yuan's peg to the dollar as the Democratic-led House was the previous two years," Scissors told China Daily. "The House Republican leadership should be concerned with more fundamental issues such as Chinese subsidies and, on the US side, the federal budget deficit. These are much bigger distractions than the exchange rate."

But he added that the weight of American pressure on China could switch from economic to political and security issues, such as regional security in the Pacific.

Though China-US relations will likely remain unaffected by the shift of power in Congress, a new aligned House will complicate the Obama administration's policy toward China.

The shift of power in the House will produce another major test for the US-China relationship, said Jonathan Pollack, a senior fellow with the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.

"Even if the Obama administration may have the major priority for the future, they have to deal with the Republican majority in the Congress as well as some members of their own party who may not be happy with all the dimensions of the US-China relations," he told China Daily.

China Daily