[asia-apec 1450] Anti-China Trade Campaign - Part 2 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

[ cont'd... Part 2 of 2 ]

The Anti-China Trade Campaign: Wrong and Dangerous

	It is against this complex backdrop of a country struggling for 
development under a political system, which, while not democratic along 
Western lines, is nevertheless legitimate, and which realizes that its 
continuing legitimacy depends on its ability to deliver economic growth 
that one must view the recent debate in the US over the granting of 
Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China.

	PNTR is the standard tariff treatment that the United States gives 
nearly all its trading partners, with the exception of China, 
Afghanistan, Serbia-Montenegro, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.  
Granting of PNTR is seen as a key step in China's full  accession to the 
World Trade Organization (WTO) since the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement 
establishing the WTO requires members to extend NTR to other WTO members 
mutually and without conditions.  This is the reason that the fight over 
PNTR is so significant, in that it is integrally linked to China's full 
accession to the WTO.

	Organized labor is at the center of a motley coalition that is against 
granting PNTR to China.  This coalition includes right wing groups and 
personalities like Pat Buchanan, the old anti-China lobby linked to the 
anti-communist Kuomintang Party in Taiwan, protectionist US business 
groups, and some environmentalist, human rights, and citizens' rights 
groups.  The intention of this right-left coalition is to be able to use 
trade sanctions to influence China's economic and political behavior as 
well as to make it difficult for China to enter the WTO.
 
	There are fundamental problems with the position of this alliance, many 
of whose members are, without doubt, acting out of the best intentions.

	First of all, the anti-China trade campaign is essentially another 
manifestation of American unilateralism.   Like many in the anti-PNTR 
coalition, we do not uphold the free-trade paradigm that underpins the 
NTR.  Like many of them, we do not think that China will benefit from 
WTO membership. But what is at issue here is not the desirability or 
non-desirability of the free trade paradigm and the WTO in advancing 
people's welfare.  What is at issue here is Washington's unilateral 
moves to determine who is to be a legitimate member of the international 
economic community--in this case, who is qualified to join and enjoy 
full membership rights in the WTO.

	This decision of whether or not China can join the WTO is one that must 
be determined by China and the 137 member-countries of the WTO, without 
one power exercising effective veto power over this process.  To subject 
this process to a special bilateral agreement with the United States 
that is highly conditional on the acceding country's future behavior 
falls smack into the tradition of unilateralism.
 
	One reason the anti-China trade campaign is particularly disturbing is 
that it comes on the heels of a series of recent unilateralist acts, the 
most prominent of which have been Washington's cruise missile attacks on 
alleged terrorist targets in the Sudan and Afghanistan in August 1998, 
its bombing of Iraq in December 1998, and the US-instigated 12-week NATO 
bombardment  of Kosovo in 1999.  In all three cases, the US refused to 
seek UN sanction or approval but chose to act without international 
legal restraints.  Serving as the gatekeeper for China's integration 
into the global economic community is the economic correlate of 
Washington's military unilateralism.

	Second, the anti-China trade campaign reeks of double standards.  A 
great number of countries would be deprived of PNTR status were the same 
standards sought from China applied to them, including Singapore (where 
government controls the labor movement), Mexico (where labor is also 
under the thumb of government), Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (where 
women are systematically relegated by law and custom to second-class 
status as citizens), Pakistan (where a military dictatorship reigns), 
Brunei (where democratic rights are non-existent), to name just a few US 
allies.  What is the logic and moral basis for singling out China when 
there are scores of other regimes that are, in fact, so much more 
insensitive to the political, economic, and social needs of their 
citizenries?

	 Third, the campaign is marked by what the great Senator J. William 
Fulbright denounced as the dark side of the American spirit that led to 
the Vietnam debacle--that is, "the morality of absolute self-assurance 
fired by the crusading spirit."10  It draws emotional energy not so much 
from genuine concerns for human and democratic rights in China but from 
the knee-jerk emotional ensemble of anti-communism that continues to 
plague the US public despite the end of the Cold War.  When one 
progressive organizer says that non-passage of the PNTR would inflict 
defeat on "the brutal, arrogant, corrupt, autocratic, and oligarchic 
regime in Beijing," the strong language is not unintentional: it is 
meant to hit the old Cold War buttons to mobilize the old 
anti-communist, conservative constituency, in the hope of building a 
right-left populist base that could--somehow--be directed at 
"progressive" ends.

	Fourth, the anti-China trade campaign is intensely hypocritical.  As 
many critics of the campaign have pointed out, the moral right of the US 
to deny permanent normal trading rights to China on social and 
environmental grounds is simply nonexistent given its record:  the 
largest prison population in the world, the most state-sponsored 
executions of any country in the world, the highest income disparities 
among industrialized countries, the world's biggest emitter of 
greenhouse gases, and quasi-slavery conditions for farm workers.11

	Fifth, the anti-China trade campaign is intellectually flawed.  The 
issue of labor control in China lies at the core of the campaign, which 
blames China's government for the low wages that produce the very 
competitively priced goods that are said to contribute to displacing US 
industries and workers.  This is plain wrong: the relatively low wages 
in China stem less from wage repression than from the dynamics of 
economic development.  Widespread poverty or low economic growth are the 
main reasons for the low wages in developing countries.  Were the state 
of unionism the central determinant of wage levels, as the AFL-CIO 
claims, labor costs in authoritarian China and democratic India, with 
its formally free trade union movement, would not be equal, as they, in 
fact, are.

	Similarly, it is mainly the process of economic growth--the dynamic 
interaction between the growing productivity of labor, the reduction of 
the wage-depressing surplus of rural labor, and rising profits--that 
triggers the rapid rise in wage levels in an economy, as shown in the 
case of Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore, which had no independent unions 
and where strikes were illegal during their periods of rapid 
development.12

	Saying that the dynamics of development rather than the state of labor 
organizing is by far the greatest determinant of wage levels is not to 
say that the organization of labor is inconsequential.  Successful 
organizing has gotten workers a higher level of wages than would be 
possible were it only the dynamics of economic development that were at 
work.  It is not to argue that labor organizing is not desirable in 
developing economies.  Of course, it is not only desirable but 
necessary, so that workers can keep more of the value of production for 
themselves, reduce their exploitation by transnational and state 
capitalist elites, and gain more control over their conditions of work.

	Sixth, the anti-China trade campaign is dishonest.  It invokes concern 
about the rights of Chinese workers and the rights of the Chinese 
people, but its main objective is to protect American jobs against cheap 
imports from China.  This is cloaking self-interest with altruistic 
rhetoric.  What the campaign should be doing is openly acknowledging 
that its overriding goal is to protect jobs, which is a legitimate 
concern and goal.  And what it should be working for is not invoking 
sanctions on human rights grounds, but working out solutions such as 
managed trade, which would seek to balance the need of American workers 
to protect their jobs while allowing the market access that allows 
workers in other countries to keep their jobs and their countries to 
sustain a certain level of growth while they move to change their 
development model.13

	Instead, what the rhetoric of the anti-China trade campaign does is to 
debase human rights and democratic rights language with its hypocrisy 
while delegitimizing the objective of protecting jobs--which is a 
central social and economic right--by concealing it.

	Seventh, the anti-China trade campaign is a classic case of blaming the 
victim.  China is not the enemy.  Indeed, it is a prisoner of a global 
system of rules and institutions that allows transnational corporations 
to take advantage of the differential wage levels of counties at 
different levels of development to increase their profits, destabilize 
the global environment by generalizing an export-oriented, 
high-consumption model of development, and concentrate global income in 
fewer and fewer hands.
  
	Not granting China PNTR will not affect the functioning of this global 
system.  Not giving China normal trading and investment rights will not 
harm transnational corporations; they will simply take more seriously 
the option of moving to Indonesia, Mauritius, or Mexico, where their 
ability to exact concessions is greater than in China, which can stand 
up to foreign interests far better than the weak governments of these 
countries.

	What the AFL-CIO and others should be doing is targeting this global 
system, instead of serving up China as a proxy for it.

A Positive Agenda

	The anti-China trade campaign amounts to a Faustian bargain that seeks 
to buy some space for US organized labor at the expense of real 
solidarity with workers and progressive worker and environmental 
movements globally against transnational capital.  But by buying into 
the traditional US imperial response of unilateralism, it will end up 
eventually eroding the position of progressive labor, environmental, and 
civil society movements both in the US and throughout the world.

	What organized labor and US NGO's should be doing, instead, is 
articulating a positive agenda aimed at weakening the power of global 
corporations and multilateral agencies that promote TNC-led 
globalization.
  
	The first order of business is to not allow the progressive movement to 
be sandbagged in the pro-permanent normal trade relations, 
anti-permanent normal trade relations terms of engagement that now 
frames the debate.  While progressives must, for the time being, oppose 
the more dangerous threat posed by the unilateralists, they should be 
developing a position on global economic relations that avoids both the 
free trade paradigm that underlies the PNTR and the unilateralist 
paradigm of the anti-PNTR forces.  The model we propose is managed 
trade, which allows trading partners to negotiate bilateral and 
multilateral treaties that address central issues in their 
relationship--among them, the need to preserve workers jobs in the US 
with the developing countries' need for market access.

	Advocacy of managed trade must, however, be part of a broader campaign 
for progressive global economic governance.  The strategic aim of such a 
campaign must be the tighter regulation, if not replacement, of  the 
model corporate-led free market development that seeks to do away with 
social and state restrictions on the mobility of capital at the expense 
of labor.  In its place must be established a system of genuine 
international cooperation and looser global economic integration that 
allows countries to follow paths of national and regional development 
that make the domestic market and regional markets rather than the 
global market the engine of growth, development, and job creation.
  
	This means support for measures of asset and income redistribution that 
would create the purchasing power that will make domestic markets 
viable.  It means support for trade measures and capital controls that 
will give countries more control over their trade and finance so that 
commodity and capital flows become less disruptive and destabilizing.  
It means support for regional integration or regional economic union 
among the developing countries as an alternative to indiscriminate 
globalization.

	A key element in this campaign for a new global economic governance is 
the abolition of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and 
the World Trade Organization that serve as the pillars of the system of 
corporate-led globalization and their replacement with a pluralistic 
system of institutions that complement but at the same time check and 
balance one another, thus giving the developing countries the space to 
pursue their paths to development.
  
	The IMF, World Bank, and WTO are currently experiencing a severe crisis 
of legitimacy, following the debacle in Seattle, the April protests in 
Washington, and the release of the report of the International Financial 
Institutions Advisory Commission (Meltzer Commission) appointed by the 
US Congress, which recommends the radical downsizing or transformation 
of the Bank and Fund.14  Now is the time for the progressive movement to 
take the offensive and push for the elimination or radical 
transformation of these institutions.  Yet, here we are, being waylaid 
from this critical task at this key moment by an all-advised, divisive 
campaign to isolate the wrong enemy!

	Another key thrust of a positive agenda is a coordinated drive by civil 
society groups in the North and the South to pressure the US, China, and 
all other governments to ratify and implement all conventions of the 
International Labor Organization (ILO) and give the ILO more effective 
authority to monitor, supervise, and adjudicate implementation of these 
conventions.  This campaign must be part of a broader effort to support 
the formation of genuine labor unions in China, the Southern United 
States, and elsewhere in a spirit of real workers' solidarity.  This, 
instead of relying on government trade sanctions that are really 
self-serving rather than meant to support Third World workers, is the 
route to the creation of really firm ties of solidarity across 
North-South lines.

	This social and economic program must be tied to a strategy for 
protecting the global environment that also eschews sanctions as an 
approach and puts the emphasis on promoting sustainable development 
models in place of the export-led, high-consumption development model; 
pushes the adoption of common environmental codes that prevent 
transnational firms from pitting one country against another in their 
search for the zero cost environmental regimes; and promotes an 
environmental Marshall Plan aimed at transferring appropriate green 
process and production technologies to China and other developing 
countries.
  
	Above all, this approach must focus not on attacking China and the 
South but on strategically changing the production and consumption 
behavior and levels in the North that are by far the biggest source of 
environmental destabilization.
 
	Finally, a positive agenda must have as a central element civil society 
groups in the North working constructively with people's movements in 
China, the United States, and other countries experiencing democratic 
deficits to support the expansion of democratic space.  While the 
campaign must be uncompromising in denouncing acts of repression like 
the Tienanmen Square massacre and Washington's use of mass incarceration 
as a tool of social control, it must avoid imposing the forms of Western 
procedural democracy on others and hew to the principle that it is the 
people in these countries themselves that must take the lead in building 
democracy according to their rhythm, traditions, and cultures.

Abandoning Unilateralism

	The anti-PNTR coalition is an alliance born of opportunism.  In its 
effort to block imports from China, the AFL-CIO is courting the more 
conservative sectors of the US population, including the Buchananite 
right wing, by stirring the old Cold War rhetoric.  Nothing could be a 
more repellent image of this sordid project than John Sweeney, James 
Hoffa, President of the Teamsters, and Pat Buchanan holding hands in the 
anti-China trade rally on April 12, 2000, with Buchanan promising to 
make Hoffa his top negotiator  of trade, if he won the race for 
president.

  Some environmental groups and citizens groups which have long but 
unsuccessfully courted labor, have, in turn, endorsed the campaign 
because they see it as the perfect opportunity to build bridges to the 
AFL-CIO.  What we have, as a result, is an alliance built on the 
assertion of US unilateralism rather than on the cornerstone of 
fundamental shared goals of solidarity, equity, and environmental 
integrity.
  
	This is not a progressive alliance but a right-wing populist alliance 
in the tradition of the anti-communist Big Government-Big Capital-Big 
Labor alliance during the Cold War, the labor-capital alliance in the 
West that produced the Exclusion and Ant-Miscegenation Acts against 
Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers in the late 19th and early 20th 
centuries, and, more recently, the populist movement that has supported 
the tightening of racist immigration laws by emphasizing the divide 
between workers who are citizens and workers who are not, with the 
latter being deprived of basic political rights.
  
	It is a policy that will, moreover, feed global instability by lending 
support to the efforts of the US right and the Pentagon to demonize 
China as The Enemy and resurrect Containment as America's Grand 
Strategy, this time with China instead of the Soviet Union as the foe in 
a paradigm designed to advance American strategic hegemony.

	As in every other instance of unprincipled unity between the right and 
some sectors of the progressive movement, progressives will find that it 
will be the right that will walk away with the movement while they will 
be left with not even their principles.
 
	It is time to move away from this terribly misguided effort to derail 
the progressive movement by demonizing China, and to bring us all back 
to the spirit of Seattle as a movement of citizens of the world against 
corporate-led globalization and for genuine international cooperation.

*Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South, a 
program of research, analysis, and capacity building based in Bangkok; 
Anuradha Mittal is co-director of the Oakland-based Institute for Food 
and Development Policy, better known as Food First.  We would like to 
thank Nicola Bullard, Peter Rosset, and Sal Glynn for their invaluable 
advice and assistance.
	

Footnotes:

1. Quoted in John Gershman, "How to Debate the China Issue without China 
Bashing," Progressive Response, Vol. 4, No. 17, April 20, 2000.
2. Lester Brown, Who Will Feed China? (New York: Norton, 1995).
3. Anil Agarwal, Sunita Narain, and Anju Sharma, eds., Green Politics 
(New Delhi: Center for Science and Environment, 2000), p. 108.
4. Ibid., p. 16.
5. FAO and IMPACT data cited in Simeon Ehui, "Trade and Food Systems in 
the Developing World," Presentation at Salzburg Seminar, Salzburg, 
Austria, May  11, 2000.
6. Amnesty International, Unted States of America: Rights for All 
(London: amnesty International Publications, 1998).
7. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, 
Straus Giroux, 1999), p. 50.
8. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American 
Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 50.
9John Gray, False Dawn (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. 189-190.
10. J. William Fulbright, quoted in Walter McDougall, Promised Land, 
Crusader State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 206.
11. See Anuradha Mittal and Peter Rosset, "The Real Enemy is the WTO, 
not China," Peaceworks, March 1, 2000; and Jim Smith, "The China 
Syndrome--or, How to Hijack a Movement," LA Labor News, Aprl 2, 2000.
12. For the state of the labor movement in these societies in the period 
of rapid growth, see Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in 
Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (San Francisco: Institute 
for Food and Development Policy, 1990).
13. For more on managed trade, see, among others, Johnson, p. 174.
14. Report of the US Congressional International Financial Institution 
Advisory Commission (Washington: DC, US Congress, Feb. 2000).

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

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