China is demanding America's best technology as the price for entry into its market.

Citing the instance of a $900 million contract for high-tech electricity-generation turbines, The Wall Street Journal said GE had to transfer its sophisticated technology to two Chinese companies that wanted to eventually make such equipment themselves.

GE's President for Global Sales Dilbert Williamson told the Journal in Beijing that it had little choice. To be considered in the bidding for equipment contracts totalling several billion dollars, GE and its competitors were required to form joint ventures with State-owned Chinese power firms.

GE was also required to transfer to the new partners technology and advanced manufacturing guidelines for the '9F' turbine, on which it had spent more than half a billion dollars to develop.

In a speech to the Asia Society on Wednesday, US Trade Reprsentative Robert Zoellick said there is much at stake for both countries and the world in how China and the US exercise power and responsibility, with China becoming the world's seventh largest economy by conventional calculations.

Zoellick said that if China does not reverse its lax enforcement of intellectual property rights, it will subvert the development of knowledge industries and innovation around the world.

Piracy of ideas in China, he alleged, is rampant. "If we can make it, they can fake it," said Zoellick. "The items being cunterfeited range far beyond DVDs and other creative media."