The soaring deficit with China has increased calls in Congress for the administration to take action against what critics complain are China's unfair trade practices such as manipulating its currency to gain trade advantages, rampant piracy of American movies and other copyrighted material and state support to the country's textile industry.

On Tuesday, the administration announced that it had reached a three-year agreement with China to limit imports of clothing and textiles, something that the U.S. industry said was desperately needed to halt a surge that began in early January and has already cost thousands of American textile jobs.

The figures for September showed that a series of "safeguard" quotas that the administration has been imposing on various categories of Chinese imports had resulted in a 5.2 percent drop in imports of Chinese clothing and textiles in September, when compared to August. However, these shipments were still up by 50.4 percent for the first nine months of this year, reflecting the surge that had occurred in earlier months before the quotas were imposed.