World Trade Organization.

In a letter to President Bush, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and 15 other Democrats urged the administration to quickly bring before the WTO 11 trade cases against China and several other nations in order to knock down some of the worst barriers hurting U.S. exporters.

The Democrats charged that the Bush administration has only brought 14 WTO cases in five years in office, while the Clinton administration averaged 11 cases per year.

They said Bush has been reluctant to pursue cases against the biggest offenders, particularly China, even as America's overall trade deficit soared to a record $724 billion last year and the imbalance with China hit $202 billion, the highest ever recorded with a single country. They said the deficits have contributed to the loss of nearly 3 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since Bush took office.

"Too often, this administration has missed opportunities to assert and defend U.S. rights under international trade rules and instead focused on moving from one new trade agreement to the next," the Democrats said in their letter to Bush.

Administration officials defended their actions, saying the WTO cases during the Clinton years represented a pent-up demand to redress problems in the organization's early years.

James Mendenhall, general counsel for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, said that the administration has filed four WTO cases in just the past year.

"We have an aggressive and proactive agenda to open markets and reduce trade barriers," Mendenhall said.

The administration is required by Congress to issue the "National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers" as a way of shining a spotlight on the practices of America's trading partners that are deemed most harmful to sales of U.S. manufactured goods, farm products and services overseas.

The administration devoted 71 pages of this year's 712-page report to criticizing China, with special emphasis on allegations that the country has failed to crack down on rampant piracy of a wide range of American products.

The report cited 60 countries, from Angola to Vietnam, and three trading blocs: the     European Union, the Arab League and the Southern African Customs Union.

The United States joined with the European Union on Thursday to file a case before the WTO accusing China of levying unfair taxes on auto parts made in the United States and other foreign countries.

The Democrats said additional WTO cases should be filed against China, accusing it of manipulating its currency to gain trade advantages, failing to crack down on rampant piracy of American goods and erecting a WTO-illegal ban on imports of U.S. blood plasma products.

The Democrats said copyright piracy cases should be filed against Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico. They also urged cases to be filed against Britain over aircraft engine subsidies; against Japan for currency manipulation; and against     South Korea and Japan over barriers to U.S. auto imports.

The administration is seeking to force China to make a number of trade concessions in coming weeks to address the huge trade gap with the United States in advance of the mid-April visit of Chinese President    

The new report will serve as a guide to U.S. negotiators over the next year in their efforts to attack barriers seen as doing the most damage to American companies.

The report has been prepared annually for 20 years under legislation Congress first passed in 1974 to require the executive branch to give an accounting of which countries were erecting the most harmful barriers to U.S. exports.