[asia-apec 1449] Anti-China Trade Campaign - Part 1 of 2

[Anuradha Mittal]

Dangerous Liaisons: Progressives, the Right, and the 
Anti-China Trade Campaign 

By Walden Bello and Anuradha Mittal*
Institute for Food and Development Policy
May 2000

[ Part 1 of 2 ]

	Like the United States, China is a country that is full of 
contradictions.  It is certainly not a country that can be summed up as 
"a rogue nation that decorates itself with human rights abuses as if 
they were medals of honor."1 This characterization by AFL-CIO chief John 
Sweeney joins environmentalist Lester Brown's Cassandra-like warnings 
about the Chinese people in hitting a new low in the rhetoric of the 
Yellow Peril tradition in American populist politics.  Brown accuses the 
Chinese of being the biggest threat to the world's food supply because 
they are climbing up the food chain by becoming meat-eaters.2

	These claims are disconcerting.  At other times, we may choose not to 
engage their proponents.  But not today, when they are being bandied 
about with studied irresponsibility to reshape the future of relations 
between the world's most populous nation and the world's most powerful 
one.

	A coalition of forces seeks to deprive China of permanent normal 
trading relations (PNTR) as a means of obstructing that country's entry 
into the World Trade Organization (WTO).  We do not approve of the 
free-trade paradigm that underpins NTR status.  We do not support the 
WTO; we believe, in fact, that it would be a mistake for China to join 
it.  But the real issue in the China debate is not the desirability or 
undesirability of free trade and the WTO.  The real issue is whether the 
United States has the right to serve as the gatekeeper to international 
organizations such as the WTO.  More broadly, it is whether the United 
States government can arrogate to itself the right to determine who is 
and who is not a legitimate member of the international community.  The 
issue is unilateralism--the destabilizing thrust  that is Washington's 
oldest approach to the rest of the world.

	The unilateralist anti-China trade campaign enmeshes many progressive 
groups in the US in an unholy alliance with the right wing that, among 
other things, advances the Pentagon's grand strategy to contain China.  
It splits a progressive movement that was in the process of coming 
together in its most solid alliance in years.  It is, to borrow Omar 
Bradley's characterization of the Korean War, "the wrong war at the 
wrong place at the wrong time."

The Real China

	To justify US unilateralism vis-…-vis China, opponents of NTR for China 
have constructed an image of China that could easily have come out of 
the pen of Joseph McCarthy.

	But what really is China?  Since the anti-China lobby has done such a 
good job telling us about China's bad side, it might be appropriate to 
begin by showing the other side.

	Many in the developing world admire China for being one of the world's 
most dynamic economies, growing between 7-10 per cent a year over the 
past decade.  Its ability to push a majority of the population living in 
abject poverty during the Civil War period in the late forties into 
decent living conditions in five decades is no mean achievement.  That 
economic dynamism cannot be separated from an event that most countries 
in the global South missed out on: a social revolution in the late 
forties and early fifties that eliminated the worst inequalities in the 
distribution of land and income and prepared the country for economic 
takeoff when market reforms were introduced into the agricultural sector 
in the late 1970's.

	China likewise underlines a reality that many in the North, who are 
used to living under powerful states that push the rest of the world 
around, fail to appreciate:  this is the critical contribution of a 
liberation movement that decisively wrests control of the national 
economy from foreign interests.  China is a strong state, born in 
revolution and steeled in several decades of wars hot and cold.  Its 
history of state formation accounts for the difference between China and 
other countries of the South, like Thailand, Brazil, Nigeria, and South 
Korea.  In this it is similar to that other country forged in 
revolution, Vietnam.
  
	Foreign investors can force many other governments to dilute their 
investment rules to accommodate them.  That is something they find 
difficult to do in China and Vietnam, which are prepared to impose a 
thousand and one restrictions to make sure that foreign capital indeed 
contributes to development, from creating jobs to actually transferring 
technology.

	The Pentagon can get its way in the Philippines, Korea, and even Japan. 
 These are, in many ways, vassal states.  In contrast, it is very 
careful when it comes to dealing with China and Vietnam, both of whom 
taught the US that bullying doesn't pay during the Korean War and the 
Vietnam War, respectively.

	Respect is what China and Vietnam gets from transnationals and Northern 
governments.  Respect is what most of our governments in the global 
South don't get.  When it comes to pursuing national interests, what 
separates China and Vietnam from most of our countries are successful 
revolutionary nationalist movements that got institutionalized into 
no-nonsense states.

What is the "Case" against China?

	Of course, China has problems when it comes to issues such as its 
development model, the environment, workers rights, human rights and 
democracy.  But here the record is much more complex than the picture 
painted by many US NGO's.

        - The model of development of outward -oriented growth built on 
exports to developed country markets of labor-intensive products is no 
scheme to destroy organized labor thought up by an evil regime.  This is 
the model that has been prescribed for over two decades by the World 
Bank and other Western-dominated development institutions for the 
developing countries.  When China joined the World Bank in the early 
eighties, this was the path to development recommended by the officials 
and experts of that institution.

	Through the strategic manipulation of aid, loans, and the granting of 
the stamp of approval for entry into world capital markets, the Bank 
pushed export-oriented, labor-intensive manufacturing and discouraged 
countries from following domestic-market-oriented growth based on rising 
wages and incomes.  In this connection, it must be pointed out that 
World Bank policies vis-…-vis China and the Third World were simply 
extensions of policies in the US, Britain, and other countries in the 
North, where the Keynesian or Social Democratic path based on rising 
wages and incomes was foreclosed by the anti-labor, pro-capitalist 
neoliberal policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and their 
ideological allies.

	- True, development in China has been accompanied by much environmental 
destruction and must be criticized.  But what many American 
environmentalists forget is that the model of double-digit GDP growth 
based on resource-intensive, waste-intensive, toxic-intensive production 
and unrestrained levels of consumption is one that China and other 
developing countries have been enouraged to copy from the North, where 
it continues to be the dominant paradigm.  Again, the World Bank and the 
whole Western neoclassical economics establishment, which has equated 
development with unchecked levels of consumption, must bear a central 
part of the blame.

	Northern environmentalists love to portray China as representing the 
biggest future threat to the global environment.  They assume that China 
will simply emulate the unrestrained consumer-is-king model of the US 
and the North.  What they forget to mention is that per capita 
consumption in China is currently just one tenth of that of developed 
countries.3  What they decline to point out is that the US, with five 
per cent of the world's population, is currently the biggest single 
source of global climate change, accounting as it does for a quarter of 
global greenhouse gas emissions.  As the Center for Science and 
Environment (CSE) points out, the carbon emission level of one US 
citizen in 1996 was equal to that of 19 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 17 
Maldivians, 49 Sri Lankans, 107 Bangladeshis, 134 Bhutanese, or 269 
Nepalis.4
 
	When it comes to food consumption, Lester Brown's picture of Chinese 
meat eaters and milk consumers destabilizing food supply is simply 
ethnocentric, racist, and wrong.  According to FAO data, China's 
consumption of meat in 1992-94 was 33 kg per capita and this is expected 
to rise to 60 kg per capita in 2020.  In contrast, the comparable 
figures for developed countries was 76 kg per capita in 1992-94, rising 
to 83 kg in 2020.  When it comes to milk, China's consumption was 7 kg 
per capita in 1992-94, rising marginally to 12 kg in 2020.  Per capita 
consumption in developed countries, in contrast was 195 kg and declining 
only marginally to 189 kg in 2020.5

	The message of these two sets of figures is unambiguous:  the unchecked 
consumption levels in the United States and other Northern countries 
continue to be the main destabilizer of the global environment.

	- True, China is no workers' paradise.  Yet it is simplistic to say 
that workers have no rights, or that the government has, in the manner 
of a pimp, delivered its workers to transnationals to exploit.  There 
are unions; indeed, China has the biggest trade union confederation in 
the world, with 100 million members.  Granted, this confederation is 
closely linked with the government.  But this is also the case in 
Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and many other 
countries.  The Chinese trade unions are not independent from 
government, but they ensure that workers' demands and concerns are not 
ignored by government.  If the Chinese government were anti-worker, as 
AFL-CIO propaganda would have it, it would have dramatically reduced its 
state enterprise sector by now.  It is precisely concern about the 
future of the hundreds of millions of workers in state enterprises that 
has made the government resist the prescription to radically dismantle 
the state enterprise sector coming from Chinese neoliberal economists, 
foreign investors, the business press, and the US government--all of 
whom are guided by a narrow efficiency/profitability criterion, and are 
completely insensitive to the sensitivity to employment issues of the 
government.

	The fact is that workers in China probably have greater protection and 
access to government than industrial workers who live in right-to-work 
states (where non-union shops are encouraged by law) in the United 
States.  If there is a government that must be targeted by the AFL-CIO 
for being anti-labor, it must be its own government, which, in collusion 
with business, has stripped labor of so many of its traditional legal 
protections and rights that the proportion of US workers unionized is 
down to only 13 per cent of the work force!

	- True, there is much to be done in terms of bringing genuine democracy 
and greater respect for human rights in China.  And certainly, actions 
like the Tienanmen massacre and the repression of political dissidents 
must be condemned, in much the same way that Amnesty International 
severely criticizes the United States for relying on mass incarceration 
as a principal mechanism of social control.6But this is not a repressive 
regime devoid of legitimacy like the Burmese military junta.

	As in the United States and other countries, there is a lot of 
grumbling about government, but this cannot be said to indicate lack of 
legitimacy on the part of the government.  Again and again, foreign 
observers in China note that while there might be disaffection, there is 
widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of the government.

	Monopolization of decision making by the Communist Party at the 
regional and national level is still the case, but relatively free 
elections now take place in many of the country's rural villages in an 
effort to deconcentrate power from Beijing to better deal with rural 
economic problems, according to New York Times  columnist Thomas 
Friedman, who is otherwise quite critical of the Chinese leadership.7

	Indeed, lack of Western-style multiparty systems and periodic 
competitive elections does not mean that the government is not 
responsive to people.  The Communist Party is all too aware of the fact 
that its continuing in power is dependent on popular legitimacy.  This 
legitimacy in turn depends on convincing the masses that it is doing an 
adequate job its fulfilling four goals:  safeguarding national 
sovereignty, avoiding political instability, raising people's standard 
of living, and maintaining the rough tradition of equality inherited 
from the period of classical socialism.  The drama of recent Chinese 
history has been the way the party has tried to stay in power by 
balancing these four concerns of the population.  This balancing act has 
been achieved, Asia expert Chalmers Johnson writes, via an "ideological 
shift from an all-embracing communism to an all-embracing nationalism 
[that has] helped to hold Chinese society together, giving it a certain 
intellectual and emotional energy and stability under the intense 
pressures of economic transformation."8
  
	- As for demand for democratic participation, this is certainly growing 
and should be strongly supported by people outside China.  But it is 
wishful thinking to claim that US-style forms of democratic expression 
have become the overwhelming demand of the population.  While one might 
not agree with all the points he makes, a more accurate portrayal of the 
state of things than that given by the anti-China lobby is provided by 
the English political philosopher John Gray in his classic work False 
Dawn:

	China's current regime is undoubtedly transitional, but rather than 
moving 
towards "democratic capitalism," it is evolving from the western, Soviet 
institutions of the past into a modern state more suited to Chinese 
traditions, needs, and circumstances.

	Liberal democracy is not on the historical agenda for China.  It is 
very doubtful if the one-child policy, which even at present is often 
circumvented, could survive a transition to liberal democracy.  Yet, as 
China's present rulers rightly believe, an effective population policy 
is indispensable if scarcity of resources is not to lead to ecological 
catastrophe and political crisis.

	Popular memories of the collapse of the state and national 
defenselessness between the world wars are such that any experiment with 
political liberalization which appears to carry the risk of near-anarchy 
of post-Soviet Russia will be regarded with suspicion or horror by the 
majority of Chinese.  Few view the break-up of the state other than a 
supreme evil.  The present regime has a potent source of popular 
legitimacy in the fact that so far it has staved off that disaster.9

[ This article continues in Part 2 ]

For the full article, visit the Food First website at:
http://www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/2000/5-china.html

===
Join the fight against hunger. For more information contact foodfirst at foodfirst.org.
___________________________________________________________
T O P I C A  The Email You Want. http://www.topica.com/t/16
Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics