Will China kick the habit?:

...should not be a prisoner of principles held inviolable in another age...

...market...

...Such are the dilemmas of doing business in China...

...It is not so much whether Barbra Streisand and Bill Gates get paid their royalties, but whether Bejing starts treating Nobel Prize nominee Wei Jingsheng as a citizen of China, having at least as many rights as Jack Valenti and other visiting American business leaders...

...A visit to Beijing in mid-January by seven heavyweights from the U.S...

...Reuters reported from Beijing that the group called China "the world's worst pirate nation...

...If (as seems likely) that commitment is included, employers who conscientiously implement the code might find some of their workers landing in jail...

...government and business leaders recognized that, because of new concerns posed by the new global economy, the U.S...

...ROBERT A. SENSER Robert A. Senser, a retired labor attache with the U.S...

...It lies in the nature of China's system...

...After further intensive negotiations, the two sides endorsed a twenty-page, single-spaced agreement on February 26, just at or a little after the U.S...

...Under its traditional ideology, Beijing insists on the principle of national sovereignty as an argument against any outside intervention in its "internal affairs...

...There the most high-profile and onerous task of the administration's whole campaign, dubbed as one of "commercial engagement," is to break China of a lucrative bad habit: massively exploiting copyrights, patents, and other intellectual property without reimbursing the owners, who are largely Americans...

...A wide implementation of the promised reforms called for in the February agreement would involve a step toward the rule of law, and therefore a whittling away at the monopoly power of the party...

...It estimated the costs to American intellectual property owners in 1993 at more than $1 billion in lost sales and revenue, about two-thirds in software products, the rest in movies, books, and miscellaneous knockoffs ranging from Gillette blades to Chrysler Jeeps...

...LESSONS FROM PIRACY The federal government's activities may soon start shrinking, but you wouldn't know it from all the human and material resources that Washington is pouring into the promotion of American business interests in foreign lands...

...The problem lies much deeper than getting China to halt illegal activities...

...Whatever its geographical scope, the challenge is to make it more than a public relations exercise...

...Such a code would, for example, rule out contracting for goods made by prison or child labor, and require recognition of the right to unionize...

...If it omits a commitment to respecting freedom of association for workers, it would be devoid of a fundamental principle...

...Over the years, Washington has repeatedly denounced China's "rampant piracy...

...In confronting Beijing on China's piracy, however, U.S...

...In the same vein, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times (January 8): "China's trade abuses and human rights abuses are just flip sides of the same coin-the absence of the rule of law...

...Human-rights concerns deserve the same recognition...

...After all, the United States went toe-to-toe with Beijing this time only because of China's failure to enforce the copyright and patent laws that it adopted after signing a "memorandum of understanding" with the United States more than three years ago...

...media moguls [potentially the major beneficiaries of the new agreement] should have the courage to say is that there is virtually no way to have a legal system that respects property rights and simultaneously ignores the civil rights of individuals," Michael Scrage, research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently wrote in his business column (Washington Post, February 10...

...property owners, mostly quite rich, but also the rights of the Chinese people, mostly very poor...

...His most recent article in Commonweal was "Danger...

...pursues bilaterally with China and mul-tilaterally within the powerful World Trade Organization, reborn early this year in Geneva...

...Most American economists and business people, under their own traditional ideologies, usually appeal to the principle of free trade as an argument against any governmental intervention in the international marketplace...

...business executives he met in Hong Kong and Beijing, but so far it has little support from the leaders of organized business in the United States...

...Friedman found some sympathy for that position among some U.S...

...In an article published in English and Chinese in Hong Kong last year, before Beijing ordered his re-arrest in March, Wei criticized China's policy of allowing foreigners many rights not accorded to Chinese citizens and warned that it could cause a backlash ("a deep popular emotion of revenge") against foreigners, including business people...

...Consider the precedents...

...Nowhere is there so much at stake, commercially and otherwise, as in the People's Republic of China...

...The vast U.S...

...But no bureaucracy willingly surrenders the power it has won...

...They belong high on the agenda of the trade policies that the U.S...

...August 19, 1994...

...Among Beijing's commitments were to launch an intensive campaign against piracy and to give market access to legitimate U.S...

...Private investigators of the victimized U.S...

...deadline...

...The ability of China's party to avoid that fate is enhanced by the absence of three preconditions for the rule of law: an independent judiciary, an independent press, and a network of organizations independent of government, such as a group representing the rights of China's own authors, inventors, and other intellectual property owners...

...With ample forewarning, on February 4, U.S...

...Children at Work" [August 19, 1994...

...law more closely than does the U.S...

...Trade Representative Mickey Kantor announced plans to impose the largest trade sanctions in U.S...

...Instead, the rule of the Communist party reaches everywhere, even into factories of the numerous new joint ventures, where party functionaries look over the shoulders of managers...

...products to replace counterfeit goods...

...movie, music, and software industries, including Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America, turned into an unusual sight for the capital of the world's largest Communist country: private business executives publicly lobbying the Chinese government and feeding the media with criticism and incriminating information...

...Despite a drive toward modernization, China remains "sometimes totalitarian, sometimes authoritarian, always unpredictable," as the Far Eastern Economic Review put it last year...

...Most of this output is exported to East Asia, where properly licensed work from the United States or Japan must compete at a price disadvantage...

...The showdown over piracy was-and is-a highly sensitive subject for U.S.-China relations, because the finger of guilt clearly points not just to bands of rogue operators but to various arms of the government itself...

...Besides, two formal U.S.-China agreements in 1992 and 1994 have failed to staunch the flow of exports made with prison labor, according to the Laogai Research Foundation, which with tiny resources monitors this violation of U.S...

...Yet in China, and under similar but smaller regimes, the code does pose a special problem...

...industries, banded together in the Washington-based International Intellectual Property Alliance, focused on the largest center for counterfeit production, Southern China, widely hailed as the country's model for modernization...

...Currently the dominant thinking within the administration is that a code should apply worldwide rather than singling out China...

...Fundamentally, then, what is at stake in this struggle is not just the rights of U.S...

...The recurrent dream of doing land-office business with a country of so many potential customers-now 1.2 billion-blinds many foreigners to the reality that China's people are twice poor: among the poorest people in the world and also deprived of the rule of law...

...China's most famous human rights advocate, Wei Jingschen, has publicly alerted the United States to the risks posed by navigating without a human-rights compass...

...public and private "engagement" with a Communist superpower, half totalitarian, half authoritarian, is a pioneering journey through uncharted waters...

...There they found twenty-nine factories, at least a few owned by military or civilian government agencies, running a booming industry using stolen masters to copy compact and laser disks on a mass basis, estimated at 75 million copies last year...

...As a sign of good faith, Beijing forced the closure of several Southern Chinese factories notorious for piracy, including one that churned out movie hits like The Lion King and Jurassic Park before they were available on the U.S...

...Foreign Service, writes for a number of periodicals on human rights issues in Asia...

...Will Beijing carry out these commitments...

...What U.S...

...The threat of huge sanctions, credible because U.S...

...industry supported them, focused the minds of senior officials in Beijing...

...After years of talking with Beijing about the issue, most recently in nine rounds of negotiation stretching over twenty months, Washington finally flexed its muscles...

...history-to go into effect in three weeks...

...There's one good way to test whether China is significantly evolving toward the rule of law...

...In May of 1994, when President Bill Clinton delinked human rights from China's entitlement to trade privileges as a "Most Favored Nation" (MFN), he announced a "new and vigorous American program" to promote human rights in China, including "the development, with American business leaders, of a voluntary set of principles for business activity in China...