Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Manufacturing executives are lobbying U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to pressure China into allowing a greater strengthening of its currency.

The National Association of Manufacturers' China Business Task Force will meet with Paulson, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab on Dec. 4 before the officials visit China the following week. A group of Chinese officials will also come to Washington next week to help prepare for Paulson's trip.

``Their major goal is currency,'' J.P. Fielder, a spokesman for the association in Washington, said today. ``They will also talk about intellectual property rights, subsidies and the trade deficit.'' The meeting with Paulson will be at the Treasury Department, he added.

Paulson, Schwab, Gutierrez and other officials are seeking to ease tensions between the two nations over currency policies and a U.S. trade deficit that's approaching an all-time high. Some companies, unions and legislators say China is keeping the yuan artificially low, giving its exporters an unfair advantage.

China pegged the yuan to the dollar until July 2005, when it was revalued and linked instead to a basket of currencies. The yuan has advanced 5.5 percent since China ended the peg, closing at 7.8360 in Shanghai today. The government limits the yuan from rising or falling more than 0.3 percent a day.

``We want to build a strategy that will allow the yuan to appreciate at a greater rate than it is now,'' Fielder said.

The U.S. trade shortfall with China reached a record $23 billion in September, from $22 billion in August, the Commerce Department said Nov. 9.

Economic Talks

Paulson's trip to China on Dec. 14-15 is the first of the new China-U.S. Economic Dialogue. Paulson and Wu Yi, China's vice premier, agreed in September to meet twice a year for talks on economic relations. Paulson said at the time he hoped the U.S. could use the new forum to convince China to allow its currency to appreciate and open its capital markets.

``As Undersecretary Tim Adams and others have traveled to Beijing over the past weeks in order to prepare for the coming dialogue, our counterparts from China are coming here to continue discussing preparation efforts,'' said Brookly McLaughlin, a Treasury spokeswoman in Washington.

Paulson, 60, said in a September speech to the NAM that threatening tariffs is the wrong way to deal with China. He also tried to douse the group's hopes of a change in China's policy.

``All that we are accomplishing here is putting a process in place where we night be more successful than we might otherwise have been,'' he said in the Sept. 27 speech in Washington. ``Time will tell how successful we'll be.''

Trade Bills

In the last two years, as many as 27 trade bills directed at China have been introduced in the U.S. Congress, according to Stephen Roach, chief global economist at Morgan Stanley in New York.

Executives from companies including U.S. Steel Corp., Cummins Inc. and Cargill Inc. are among those who will meet with Paulson, said Fielder. It will be the first gathering of the NAM group with cabinet members since it was created in October, said J.P. Fielder, a spokesman for the association.

Paulson acknowledged in a London speech this week that U.S. trade ties with China have suffered from ``tension'' that must be addressed, partly through greater flexibility in the yuan.

There is ``a feeling that's fairly widespread in the U.S. that the benefits of the trade between our two countries aren't being shared evenly or fairly,'' he said at a conference of the Confederation of British Industry on Nov. 28. It's in ``China's best interest'' to open its economy, he said.

Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief executive officer, may face increased pressure from Congress to coax -- or coerce -- policy changes from China after Democrats won control of both houses of the U.S. Congress last month. Many of the winning candidates campaigned with a harder line on trade issues, especially China's exchange rate.

Under Paulson's watch, Goldman sold more stock in initial public offerings of Chinese companies than any other bank. Goldman oversaw Bank of China Ltd.'s initial share sale in Hong Kong in May and managed the IPOs of several other companies.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alison Fitzgerald in Washington at Afitzgerald2@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: December 1, 2006 19:17 EST