China, The United States,and Human Rights
Amsden, Alice H.
The Clinton administration has apparently abandoned any effort, even the pretense of an effort, to press China on human rights issues. Questions about political repression and coerced labor are...
...social (the right to form organizations...
...The same willingness to sacrifice—in the face of negative growth—is now evident in Burma (Myanmar...
...Suppose Washington imposes high tariff barriers on China's exports to force political reform...
...Questions about political repression and coerced labor are still "raised" at diplomatic meetings, but without any suggestion that persistence in these practices will have economic consequences—loss ofmost-favorednation status, delay or rejection of trade agreements, selective embargoes of Chinese products, and so on...
...Should American liberals and leftists be pressing the Clinton administration for an activist, interventionist foreign policy in defense of rights...
...Is this a persuasive response...
...Or should the United States use its economic power to punish violations of human rights in countries like China...
...It has to engage large numbers of people from within...
...Authoritarian regimes pay huge sums of money to import weapons that result in lower national living standards...
...Instead, we are told that the best way to bring about changes in China is through maximizing its exposure to the West—which means, in practice, maximizing its participation in the global free market...
...Should we stop buying from China and start buying from India, a democracy with about the same per-capita income as China but with double its rates of infant mortality and illiteracy...
...For sanctions to be even moderately effective against a big trader like China they would have to be imposed against other big traders that are also human rights abusers...
...In 1948 the United Nations unanimously endorsed four types of human rights: political (the right to free elections...
...Therefore, there is intense grassroots hostility in these countries toward international incentives that jeopardize such growth in the name of either promoting or defending dissent...
...Or patronize Thailand, which has parliamentary elections (sort of) but ubiquitous child prostitution...
...The focus of a progressive human rights agenda should be the arms trade...
...exports, whose eventual decline would harm American workers in the long run...
...Yet honoring both economic and social rights is critical in building a popular human rights effort...
...But this doesn't necessarily mean we should favor sanctions...
...We need a progressive agenda for human rights that is more than a knee-jerk response to the multinationals that are shaping post-cold war foreign policy...
...Most likely our demand for China's exports will be diverted to suppliers in other low-wage countries...
...Such generalized trade barriers might delight American wage earners and SPRING • 1997 • 7 Human Rights and China radicals in the short run...
...It is wishful thinking to imagine that workers the world over share the same economic interests and that tying human rights to market access benefits one and all...
...The point is that almost all these other countries have human rights records as reprehensible as that of China—Mexico, Colombia, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and so forth...
...Thus, political idealism and economic pragmatism operate in unison and many American progressives clamor for trade sanctions to kill two birds—China's gulag and stagnating U.S...
...After all, arms are designed to kill people and are the most offensive breach of human rights...
...By contrast, economic policies in China and other emerging economies have created economic miracles, with massive job creation and real wage increases...
...Economic sanctions are thus unilateral protectionism by another name And what kind of human rights are we talking about anyway...
...But they are almost certain to invite retaliation against U.S...
...Sanctions are promoted as being in the best political and economic interests of both American and third world workers— more human rights in poor countries supposedly mean more political clout for labor and hence better working conditions...
...and economic (the right to a job and life-preserving health care...
...China's human rights abuses are in the limelight not because they are exceptionally egregious but because China's trade surplus with the United States is huge and its future as an economic power is frightening...
...Over half of American arms sales are to the third world, and the largest arms merchant of all is the United States (followed by Britain and France...
...Moreover, economic sanctions would penalize some of the world's most exploited workers (even ignoring a tiny minority of prison labor) by cutting back their exports...
...To protect its own profitability, business opposes economic sanctions against human rights violators...
...For example, apartheid in South Africa was harmful to Africans both politically and economically and thus African people supported international economic sanctions against apartheid even at their own personal expense...
...To broaden the movement, human rights themselves have to be defined broadly...
...EDS...
...Unfortunately, none of this makes much practical sense...
...8 • DISSENT...
...wages allegedly caused by free trade and cheap foreign labor...
...The United States has ignored the last right, domestically and internationally, and hasn't exactly championed the right to organize either...
...An essential element of a progressive strategy is that the fight for human rights can't be imposed from without...
...legal (the right to due process...
...Human rights activists should push for monitoring such flows, making them more transparent, and then raise the prospect of an arms embargo to and from the worst human rights offenders...
Vol. 44 • April 1997 • No. 2
