No to Appeasement
No to Appeasement The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote next week on the extension of China's most-favored-nation trading status. How it will turn out is anyone's guess; the House...
...And that is what's at issue in next week's House MFN vote...
...And China's apparent attempt illegally to purchase favorable U.S...
...Why a French Airbus salesman cannot teach democracy as well as an American Boeing representative has never been explained...
...He is being tortured with electrical batons and deprived of water...
...And if they cannot ship those goods to America, then "replacement" investment and export opportunities for our allies will vanish before they emerge...
...President Clinton's policy is appeasement...
...President Clinton doesn't want to capture Beijing's attention...
...dealmakers...
...He has appointed a ten-member task force to come up with "alternative" China legislation designed to give the House protective political cover for approval of an MFN extension...
...With reason...
...Elite America's Sinophile "engagement" dogma has had a very bad year...
...But MFN proponents do not really believe this eyewash about the special, missionary powers of U.S...
...This is offensive...
...Liu's wife says she has written letters and made appeals to "every official body I can think of" but "no one has paid attention...
...This year's roll call on MFN will be a referendum on appeasement...
...Sounds large...
...And we urge members of the House who share our misgivings, Republicans and Democrats alike, to use the MFN legislation to register their own disapproval...
...if they could ship those billions in manufactured goods someplace else, they would be doing it already...
...America has only one president and one China policy at a time...
...That in itself is a remarkable development...
...corporate chieftains: that face-to-face contact with American businessmen has an invaluable tutelary effect on the Chinese, and that if we withhold that contact by restricting trade then there will be no one left in China to preach the gospel of liberty...
...the House Republican leadership is split on the question, so its nose-counting whip system isn't operating...
...They likely won't get another chance until this time next year...
...Gingrich's initiative is worse than useless...
...Our purchasing power is irreplaceable to Beijing...
...The "overall trend," she insists, is in the right direction...
...We have other export markets...
...The U.S...
...But even this allegedly daunting prospect isn't very likely...
...Instead we need "a dialogue that expands the full breadth of our bilateral relationship" with the Chinese, says Secretary of State Albright...
...They can't believe it...
...Defying the speaker, Republican Chris Cox of California, a stalwart critic of Beijing, will attempt to bring ten separate pieces of China legislation to the House floor—some of which do involve specialized trade sanctions—next week or soon thereafter...
...So the hat-in-hand toothlessness of American engagement with China— symbolized by Vice President Gore's champagne-glass toast to Premier Li Peng a few months back—has never been more obvious...
...What cannot survive and flourish without MFN is current American China diplomacy...
...It isn't...
...In particular, the plight of China's huge but persecuted Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian communities has finally come into sharp relief—the subject of a major grass-roots mobilization of religious conservatives led by Gary Bauer's Family Research Council...
...There's a simple explanation...
...So what...
...Then, too, the specter of Hong Kong's retrocession to the mainland, two weeks from now, has made a lot of people nervous...
...It will not, and should not, serve simply to express distaste for Chinese communism...
...This is a particularly goofball riff on the favorite "high-minded" claim of U.S...
...In the past few weeks, as the MFN debate has wound to its conclusion, Beijing has denied medical treatment to two seriously ill imprisoned Shanghai dissidents, the brothers Yao Zhenxiang and Yao Zhenxian...
...This is an oddly Marxist argument for capitalists to make, with its assumption that politics always follows money...
...Senator Phil Gramm of Texas tells the Wall Street Journal that MFN revocation would "limit my freedom...
...It is less than 2 percent of our total foreign market, a fleaspeck on the American economy—a share of GDP somewhere between ten and twenty thousandths of 1 percent...
...There has been fresh evidence of Beijing's horrific domestic repression...
...Everything has gone wrong...
...MFN revocation will have no meaningful effect on the Chinese, the Clinton administration and its allies announce...
...It does not, for the most part, allow foreign-owned industry to sell stuff in China...
...Gao Feng, a Protestant activist, and Zhou Guoqiang, a dissident poet, have recently had their prison sentences extended by fiat—because they refuse to confess their "crimes...
...Liu was healthy when he entered prison in May 1995...
...Read the Clinton administration's speech texts carefully...
...If "I want to buy a shirt made in China," he thunders, then by God that's his right as an American...
...Gingrich has given the task force only one instruction: no trade sanctions...
...He hasn't the stomach for it...
...The American economy "will survive and flourish," Sandy Berger acknowledges, however MFN is decided...
...Not nearly so much as the spooky numbers thrown around by MFN's defenders imply...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Would it hurt the United States...
...technology for use in its ballistic-missile modernization program...
...But the main and inescapable question will still be MFN...
...House speaker Gingrich, for his part, is busy trying to sabotage the MFN vote...
...Beijing rigorously plans its trade, remember...
...That $590 million is a "tax" on the average American of less than half a cent a day...
...Come what may, it looks as though revocation of MFN will win more House votes than it has in a good long while...
...Rather, Beijing imports raw materials only to manufacture goods for re-export—to the United States, more than anywhere else...
...MFN revocation would hurt the Chinese, in other words...
...In the same Heilongjiang province labor camp, trade union organizer Liu Nianchun is on a similar hunger strike...
...Significant defections from a traditionally "pro-China" GOP are a new thing...
...If we pull out, the French and Germans and Japanese will quickly take our place...
...We exported $12 billion to China last year...
...Things can only get worse in the meantime...
...it is flatly inconsistent with all the other propaganda in their briefing books...
...The Clinton administration declines to pay attention to almost every threatening or inhuman gesture the Chinese make—because serious attention would demand a serious penalty...
...And a trade penalty would harm our "dialogue...
...The United States has other, non-Chinese sources of low-cost imports, too...
...import/export imbalance—managed by Beijing to the advantage of People's Liberation Army-dominated firms—has reached its widest yawn, making plain how little the Chinese really care about free trade as an international principle...
...We have no confidence in that policy...
...Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser, takes leave of his senses and suggests that communism is "dying" in China, that market development there already "substitutes for ideology...
...In any case, it simply isn't true that the China trade is a zero-sum game, or that Beijing holds all the cards, or that U.S...
...He now has a cancerous tumor, festering sores on his jaw, a blocked intestine, and severe rectal bleeding...
...Trade is the one weapon in America's arsenal that grabs Beijing's attention...
...They are on a hunger strike...
...The Clinton administration declines to pay attention to Liu Nianchun—and thousands like him...
...election results last year has made a lot of people angry...
...trade representative Charlene Barshefsky says American shoppers will eat the full cost of higher Chinese tariffs and wind up paying $590 million more each year for shoes and such if MFN is repealed...
...He denies even that it is necessary...
...Instead, the MFN vote will be an up-or-down vote of confidence on U.S...
...There have been almost weekly disclosures of Chinese arms sales and military technology diversions...
...The Clinton administration declines to pay attention when Beijing purchases U.S...
...Note how mechanical and incoherent the standard arguments for MFN have become...
...To be sure, China-directed toadyism is a bipartisan affliction...
...workers and consumers must inevitably suffer from the higher tariffs on Chinese imports that MFN revocation would bring...
...they know the truth full well...
...The Constitution guarantees access to cheap T-shirts made by slave labor, apparently...
...The honorable vote is no...
...The Philippines, Malaysia, India, Latin America—all would probably be delighted to make our sneakers...
...China policy writ large...
...China is not the only developing country on earth...
...A trade penalty...
...The shift of popular sentiment against business as usual with China is new, too...
...A lot...
...It will not, and should not, primarily represent a judgment on how best to strengthen the American economy...
...The United States is 40 percent of China's export market, an amount equal to 2 or 3 percent of its entire gross domestic product...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 40
