The campaign will be part of the efforts to get the Bush administration to accept and approve petitions to impose temporary limits - called the China safeguard - on textile and apparel imports. It is to limit China’s dominance of the industry in the United States when the 40-year-old quota system expires on 1 January 2005.

"We need to change trade policy in this country," Cass Johnson, president of NCTO (National Council of Textile Organizations), said in a recent interview. "We need a trade policy whose purpose is to prevent jobs from going overseas."

Industry leaders hope to have the initial safeguards in place on the most sensitive categories of garments by 2005.