CHINA can not accept the "indiscriminate" ban on four kinds of Chinese seafood by the United States, a top Chinese official in charge of quality inspections said yesterday, according to Bloomberg News.

"China has always taken a cooperative spirit with the US when it comes to quality of imported American goods," Li Changjiang, director of the State Administration of Quality Inspection, said in Beijing in a statement posted on the agency's Website. "We hope the US would do the same when it comes to our products."

Concerns over the safety of Chinese products are seeping into trade and exacerbating US anxiety over the trade gap with China, estimated by the Asian Development Bank to widen 45 percent next year to a record US$257 billion. Chinese agricultural exports to the US reached US$2.26 billion last year, Associated Press reported on Saturday.

"The US is starting to use technical and quality standards as a trade barrier against China," Guan Anping, a Beijing-based trade lawyer, said via telephone. "It's easy to pick on products such as seafood, but you can pick on seafood from any nation, not only China."

The US Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday it would detain three types of Chinese farm-raised fish, catfish, basa and dace, as well as shrimp and eel unless suppliers could prove the shipments didn't contain harmful residues.

China has already taken measures to solve the problems, the statement cited Li as saying to US Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt in a telephone conversation on Friday.