The US government has made progress in issuing visas to Chinese citizens, but there is still much work to be done. Due to the visa bottleneck, American businesses lost a lot of sales opportunities, according to the 2005 White Paper on American Business in China published lately by Amcham-China (The American Chamber of Commerce of the People's Republic of China) and Amcham-Shanghai.

The business visa project provided by Amcham-China and Amcham-Shanghai will continue to help and serve member enterprises that have employees going to the United States to work, the white paper noted. However, a survey among member enterprises showed that some American companies were still losing sales contracts worth tens of millions of dollars because their Chinese clients failed to obtain visas.

By People's Daily Online