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China Trade — Kowtow to democracy or mammon?


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By John Metzler
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

September 20, 2000

United Nations — The Clinton Administration and Congress have passed landmark legislation which paves the way to Permanent Normal Trading Relations with the People's Republic of China. Thus an Administration which once disdainfully spoke of "coddling the butchers of Beijing" is now more than happy to do a lucrative business deal with them. Of course this is all selflessly performed in the name of "expanding democracy" which to be more precise translates to a better bottom line for U.S. firms.

Social and economic reforms promoted through free trade do erode static political systems such as People's China--on this point I agree that wider trade can bring about a strengthening of China's robust private sector and help to loosen the political grip of the ruling Chinese Communist Party CCP. Can Marxism and Markets coexist?

Both the Clinton/Gore Administration and a strong bipartisan Senate consensus of 83-15 has sufficiently airbrushed China's image, have rationalized the oft-repeated mantra that our trade will undermine the PRC's dictatorship, and have dutifully kowtowed not before Beijing's rulers, but the golden Mammon of markets and money.

Thus rather than even going the pro-forma route of having some oversight on hideous human rights abuses, or sanctions on missile sales to Pakistan, the Senate in its wisdom deemed that this deal was too good to be missed. This just after a State Department report warned that human rights in China continue to erode, Washington gave Beijing this sought after benediction rather than face the annual renewal process.

America's historic enchantment and indeed seductive fascination with the "China Market" goes back to the Clipper Ships and China trade in the early American Republic. Even on the twilight of Manchu rule in the Ching Dynasty, the US established essentially Most Favored Trade with Imperial China. The lure and the luster has always been there. The reality has similarly been viewed through a golden haze of expectations.

When Jimmy Carter recognized the PRC back in 1979, offering diplomatic recognition to the world's largest dictatorship, nearly all were assured that the ensuing China Trade would be a boom for American business. Alas, twenty years on, the boom is for PRC business, with last years staggering $70 billion trade deficit being the result of a genuinely unbalanced trade relationship. Much of the deficit is not with firms controlled directly by the State and the People's Liberation Army.

If we are to believe the business lobby spin, American firms will now have a fair chance to penetrate PRC markets--stated another way the growth of the deficit may be marginally slower. Likewise, if Mainland markets really do open to American products, inefficient Chinese firms will face genuine competition and job cuts.

Yet, Chinese consumers simply do not have the buying power of the Japanese or Koreans. Furthermore there are really "two Chinas" and on the Mainland. The China that is seen glittering Shanghai, buoyant Beijing, and entrepreneurial Canton--historically windows to the West, belies the China profound few can or wish to see--a desolate depth of social degradation. One can go from 21st century Shanghai and in a mater of hours travel back through the centuries, to an unpleasant and brutish past which is very much the present in which the majority live.

In the past six months, basically since the House of Representatives vote and now the Senate vote, Beijing has been on very good political behavior. Having achieved a crowning commercial pact with Washington, the PRC will become bolder on the foreign policy front. On the eve of the vote, feeling emboldened, Beijing rearrested Chinese Catholic Bishop Zeng Jingmu (81) of Jiangxi Province who had been released from a labor camp in honor of Bill Clinton's State visit to the PRC in 1998. This follows a continuing crackdown on Chinese Catholic and Protestants churches.

The Clinton Administration calls PNTR a major foreign policy achievement--I hope Bill Clinton shamelessly takes all the credit for this. Someday when China is free, someday when the curtain is lifted and the truth emerges about the People's Republic what we will see will pall what was discovered in the former Soviet Union, and someday when the great Chinese people look to those who sustained the CCP Dynasty, Bill Clinton should feel singularly honored.

John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.

September 20, 2000


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