Editorial from The Nation
The fierce debate over China's entry into the World Trade Organization needs a field guide. The birds of a feather flocking to it are bizarre. To end annual Congressional review of China's trade status, a key part of the deal, the Fortune 500 companies have joined the Democratic President to the Republican Congressional leaders who tried to impeach him. In opposition, the internationalist Seattle coalition of labor, students and environmental, consumer and human rights activists are joined by unregenerate cold warriors and xenophobes like Pat Buchanan.
There isn't even agreement on what the fight is about. The President and the cold warriors seem intent on replaying the old debate about whether we should engage or isolate China. But that's a dead letter. We're running a $70 billion annual trade deficit with China. It receives far more foreign direct investment than any other developing country. Trade, investment and reform will continue whether China enters the WTO or not. The question isn't whether to engage China; it's what the terms of that engagement will be.
Even for this White House the gulf between rhetoric and reality is striking. President Clinton is trying to sell this as a trade deal that's good for America and also as a historic reform that will endow China with the blessings of liberty. The trade claims are exaggerated and disingenuous. Every trade deal of the past decade has been hailed as opening China's markets, even as the trade deficit has skyrocketed. The most detailed Administration estimate by the International Trade Commission assumes generously that our exports to China will rise faster than our imports under this deal; even so, it projects a possible doubling of the trade deficit to more than $130 billion a year in the next ten years.
In fact, the Chinese leaders have no intention of surrendering control over their markets -- nor should they. For example, the Administration is making a big play for the farm vote by claiming the agreement will open up a market of 1.2 billion people for US farmers. Don't bet the farm on that. The Chinese are sensibly intent on self-sufficiency in agriculture and today sell us more produce than they buy from us. With millions of unemployed peasants in the cities, the last thing China needs is to have millions more displaced by a flood of imports from massively subsidized US agribusinesses. Moreover, contrary to the President's claims, even if China enters the WTO without US support, our bilateral treaties with China guarantee that we will get the same treatment as our competitors. And as the purchaser of up to 40 percent of Chinese exports, we surely have the clout to insist on it.
The President also claims that the deal will foster dramatic change in China, for it will "import one of democracy's most cherished values -- economic freedom." In fact, the Chinese leaders are in difficult straits, seeking to attract foreign capital and open up globally competitive factories while slowly dismantling state industries and subsidies. Inevitably, tens of millions of workers are going to lose their jobs in a country in which the safety net has been provided mainly by the enterprises that are being dismantled. Surely one reason that the Chinese leadership wants the deal -- and the waiver of annual review of their trading status -- is to reassure foreign investors that no matter how horrific the upheaval, access to Western markets is guaranteed. And they can lay the blame for the most disruptive reforms on the WTO and foreign capitalists.
Clinton paints the global corporations as philanthropic agents of democracy, but they are unlikely champions of freedom. They prefer order to democracy, powerless workers to organized ones, self-regulation to environmental and consumer protections. China attracts investment primarily as an export platform with cheap, disciplined labor, where union organizers are immediately clapped in jail and worker protests are squelched. The President says he wants to avoid a race to the bottom in the global economy, but bringing China into the WTO and waiving annual review of its trading status is like firing the starter's gun. Asia's fragile democracies -- Thailand, the Philippines, Korea, where workers have the right to organize -- will find China setting the competitive floor on everything from salaries to environmental despoliation.
In the end, the debate isn't about trade benefits or about China's internal reforms. It's a choice between the past and the future. The China deal is part of the past, the militant campaign of the past twenty-five years by global corporations and banks seeking to break down regulation, weaken labor unions, sweep away socialist and social democratic regimes, and forge an unregulated global economy. Their success has generated growth, but also growing inequality, increasing instability, environmental destruction and a return of the satanic mills of a bygone day. The challenge of the future is carried by the Seattle coalition that seeks to create the rules -- at national and global levels -- that empower workers, protect the environment and consumers, and make this global economy work for the many, not just the few.
If Clinton were serious about meeting that challenge rather than furthering the goals of global corporations, he would continue to engage China -- expanding trade through already established channels while pushing arms control and encouraging reforms. He would also work to give struggling democracies that protect independent worker movements preferential access to our markets over authoritarian regimes that repress free association. His priority would be to bring workers' rights and environmental protections into the global trading system, not to usher in China and impede progress on those issues. Without such leadership, the Seattle coalition -- the best hope for progressive change to emerge in decades -- has little choice but to oppose the corporate agenda until those in power hear the voices of the growing movement for democracy. That, in the end, is what the China vote is about.:
