Outlook for trade with China;

              THE OUTLOOK FOR TR7IDE WITH CHIN7I
AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM W. MORISON
DH&S Reports: Mr. Mori son, can you give us some background on the National Council for U.S.-China Trade and your work as a director of that organization?
WWM • We probably ought to start with my involvement with the People's Republic of China, because thai antedated my activities with the National Council In brief, as a matter of policy the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce as early as the. mid-1960s advo-cated increased trade with China For that specific reason — and for other reasons such as that San Francisco is on the West Coast and we have here the largest Chinese population outside Asia — the leadership of the People's Republic had a very favorable feeling toward San Francisco
Editor's Note: The resump-tion of relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, begun under the Nixon Administration and for-malized by President Car-ter; has raised a whole new series of questions for American business. How much trade can we expect to do with China? What will they want to buy from us? What might we buy from them? What is it like to trade with the Chinese?
William W. Morison, who prior to his retirement several months ago was chairman of the board of Foremost-McKesson, Inc., a client of our San Francisco office, made his first trip to China in 1972 Since thai time, both as a director of The National Council for U S -China Trade and as president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, he has led two trade delegations to the People's Republic of China 3nd par-ticipated in trade talks with Chinese delegations visiting the United States
Although Mr. Morison insists that his views represent one man's opinion, we would at least qualify this to say that it is one man's informed opinion. Following is a slightly edited text of an Interview held this spring with Mr Morison
President Nixon's visit to China in February 1972 culminated in the Shanghai Communique, which set the principles for the way in which the two nations regard each other and remains the basic document behind the recent U S -China accord Following that, the Chinese issued a few invitations to Americans to attend the Canton Trade Fair being held that spring The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce received an invitation It was the only such organization to be invited, and it sent the head of its international department.
At the time of the 1972 fall trade fair the Chinese again sent a special invitation to the Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber decided that it should respond with a business representative. 1 was a director of the Chamber at the time and the vice president of the international department, and so I went to China on behalf of the business community of San Francisco
I went first to Hong Kong, then to Canton and then up to Peking and was very well received We talked about what it would take to enhance trading relations between China and the United States. That trip was followed by an invitation from the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, or CCPIT which performed some of the trade-promotion (unctions for China that our State Department and Commerce Department handled in this country At that lime the Chinese were organized into seven basic trading corporations that did all the buying and all the selling within the product classifications they represented. The CCPIT was the vehicle that promoted contact and relationships between the outside world and the trading corporations.
In 1975 the president of CCPIT invited the Chamber of Commerce to organize a trade delegation of senior business execu-tives The delegation was to go to China for high-level but informal talks on establishing the needed mechanisms for the promotion of trade between our two countries At the time China insisted upon a person-to-person approach rather than working through gov-ernmental agencies
We put together a rather impressive delegation, some of the top business people from San Francisco I chaired the delegation. We had mostly CEOs (chief executive officers), nine of them from the Hay area.
In China we talked informally about alt the issues that the Chinese wanted to talk about and that we wanted to talk about We provided China with input in two important areas •— we were help-ing them to gain a better understanding of the American business
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