China and the United States should cooperate to find the true extent of the bilateral trade imbalance, said Xie Fuzhan, director of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

The two countries required improvements in their statistics compilations to ascertain a figure that more accurately reflected their trade, said Xie in the meeting with Robert Cooper, of the United States International Trade Commission (USITC).

Cooper said the two countries should work to diminish statistical errors and standardize the statistics methods.

China's trade surplus with the United States amounted to about 100 billion U.S. dollars according to Chinese statistical methods, but it reached nearly 200 billion dollars with US methods.

The two countries use rules of origin to gather statistics for trade volume, which many economists believe have errors in terms of processing trade and transit trade.