Trading Places
EDITORIAL Trading Places Once upon a time, not so long ago, Communist regimes dotted the globe and Americans knew what we thought of them. We disliked them. Because we saw ourselves as the heart...
...The WTO treaty will require us to make MFN a permanent, unreviewable gift to China, and we will thus go still more shamefully silent about the nature of that regime...
...And it never will...
...engagement in general...
...And we do not recall a single day since when American businessmen and their political frontmen in Washington have succeeded, through the miracle of marketing, in making China a "more open, and, hopefully, more pluralistic, ultimately, place...
...The Chinese may indeed turn out to be the world economy's "next big thing," as the Wall Street engagement priesthood desperately hopes...
...The WTO deal was unveiled with predictable fanfare by the Clinton administration...
...There remain "elements of the country"—the unsavory ones, presumably—that "will never change...
...If China is now accepted into the WTO, even this faint echo of America's once proud adherence to democratic anti-communism will fade to nothing...
...And Beijing is struggling to manage a deflationary spiral, and may soon devalue the yuan—which would erase any short-term American trade-balance benefit from WTO-mandated tariff reductions...
...that they have accepted another generation of enslavement to the Communist party in return for an opportunity to get rich and acquire modern consumer goods...
...Nifty and vulgar and lazy and false...
...it was the Statue of Liberty...
...Even long-term, in a purely economic context, the new deal will "work" only if multilateral enforcement mechanisms make it work...
...We do not recall those protesters choosing a future of cash-and-communism...
...On November 10, Chen Jianguo was arrested in Shandong province, also on a charge of subversion, for the crime of founding a second independent opposition group, the China National Freedom party...
...You hear it again and again, these days: that since 1989 the Chinese people have struck an implicit bargain with their rulers...
...This is what Communists do...
...It is only a "market-opening agreement" that she has concluded with China...
...The president himself, at a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, was even more expansive, almost a walking parody of engagement dogma—by which the Earth is a financial market, not a collection of political actors, and what is good for that market automatically serves God's overarching design...
...Its four state-owned banks are essentially insolvent, with $120 billion in uncleared debt (representing a staggering 12 percent of GDP...
...It never has...
...Because we saw ourselves as the heart and mind and muscle of liberty, we felt obliged, as a matter of principle, to resist the advance of these dictatorships—and to remember and speak for their already conquered victims...
...National Economic Council director Gene Sperling, on the ground in Beijing, gushed about how the entire "future of the global economy" would be improved by the success of his negotiations...
...Whiter whites, bluer blues...
...We do not recall a papier-mache figure of Alan Greenspan guiding the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989...
...What, then, about our country, the United States...
...We are rather more concerned about the noneconomic claims made on behalf of China's WTO accession, in particular, and Sino-U.S...
...This semi-conscious slide to appeasement was on full display with the announcement two weeks ago of a bilateral agreement for Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization...
...Simply shipping them cell phones and soybeans will not make them stop...
...These past 10 years, with the Berlin Wall a ruin, the United States has understandably relaxed its assumptions about the scale and immediacy of communism's threat...
...It has 15 to 20 million urban unemployed...
...The stuff itself will bring a happy bonus, we are further instructed...
...For in the course of a famously intensive "engagement" with mainland China, our country has effectively all but abandoned its traditional objections to the very nature of communism...
...we remember them getting run over by tanks...
...For years now, congressional consideration of China's "most favored nation" (MFN) trading status has been the principal formal mechanism by which our complacent government so much as debates the proper American posture toward Beijing's brutal dictatorship...
...And at the same time, through its eager approach to the world's last remaining dictatorial monolith, the United States has performed a still more momentous— and, this one, dishonorable—reversal...
...We no longer even bother to be appalled by it...
...Nifty and vulgar and lazy and false...
...The WTO pact, Clinton proclaimed, would advance the cause of everything "from nonproliferation to regional security to environmental protection to human rights...
...that what they really want America to do now is sell them stuff, nothing more...
...trade representative Charlene Barshefsky arrived in Beijing for the final week of WTO negotiations on November 8. On November 9, China sentenced four founders of the now-crushed China Democracy party to prison sentences—for "subversion"—of 5 to 11 years...
...Success," in other words, remains highly speculative...
...And, truth be told, in the grand scheme of things, we don't much care whether the speculation bears fruit...
...Gene Sperling and U.S...
...It will change the United States, however...
...On November 12, the day the WTO deal was finalized, China sent four more members of the Falun Gong meditation movement to the gulag, merely for requesting that their previously incarcerated compatriots be released...
...Not for the better...
...As Barshefsky says, the WTO deal by itself will not change China...
...National security adviser Sandy Berger, for example, suggests that the new trade made possible by the administration's WTO breakthrough will "make China, I believe, a more open, and, hopefully, more pluralistic, ultimately, place...
...Not anymore...
...It is all very nifty, this "sophisticated" case for engagement...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...But it may not happen, and the reasons why are hardly a secret...
...For 40-plus years following World War II, anti-communism was a central means by which America defined its place in the community of nations...
...China's growth rate has slowed...
...We no longer seek to contain this form of tyranny...
...We have to be realistic," the exhausted Barshefsky let slip to the New York Times on her way back to Washington...
...That would seem to us the most relevant question...
...It is all very nifty, the Clinton administration's "sophisticated" case for engagement...
...Now, we're not quite sure how completely these people believe their own propaganda about the virtues of the deal qua deal...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 12
