"With a congressional vote looming in the spring of 2000, President Bill Clinton mustered his best arguments for why lawmakers should approve his proposed deal for China to join the World Trade Organization.
"Adding China would link Beijing to Western economies and reduce the government’s ability to control its vast population, he said in a speech that March at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies. “By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products, it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom,” Mr. Clinton said. “When individuals have the power not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.”
"Mr. Clinton’s idealistic rhetoric played well among most of Washington’s elites, but a trade lawyer often dismissed as a protectionist, Robert Lighthizer, was skeptical. As he had warned in a New York Times op-ed a few years earlier, if admitted to the WTO, mercantilist China would become a “dominant” trading nation. “Virtually no manufacturing job in [the U.S.] will be safe,” he wrote.
"Mr. Lighthizer is now the U.S. Trade Representative, President Donald Trump’s chief negotiator on global trade. In the administration’s view, allowing China to enter the WTO in 2001 was a historic mistake that cost the U.S. millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in accumulated trade deficits. The U.S. is now bypassing WTO rules and threatening Beijing with tariffs on up to $500 billion of imported goods.
"The moves against China are part of Mr. Trump’s wider effort to upend longstanding U.S. policy on trade and also the international institutions and agreements that govern trade. Whether the administration’s shift is a much-needed corrective or a disastrous reversal depends in large part on how one views the original decision to bring China into the international trade regime.
"...After the deal, foreign investment in Beijing mushroomed from $47 billion in 2001 to $124 billion a decade later. The lower investment and import restrictions required of China as part of its WTO entry also encouraged multinationals to rush in, as did the prospect of serving the vast Chinese market. China became the world’s manufacturing floor, and Chinese imports to the U.S. soared.
"Looking back now, whose expectations for the wider impact of the deal proved most accurate? On the issue of U.S. manufacturing jobs, critics made the right call. A study by the MIT economist David Autor and colleagues calculated that Chinese competition cost the U.S. some 2.4 million jobs between 1999 and 2011, battering factory towns that made labor-intensive goods.
"That result haunts one of Mr. Clinton’s senior China negotiators, Robert B. Cassidy, who believes that his work only helped big businesses, not ordinary workers. “When you retire you like to think that you accomplished a lot,” he says now, at age 73. “What kind of benefit did I produce from working around the clock? I was incredibly disappointed.”
"Nor did China open up politically, as many WTO advocates had hoped. Beijing tamed the internet by limiting its use to commerce, technology and social media. It blocked political organizing by threatening and sometimes jailing those who posted critical comments. More recently, it has turned the internet itself into an instrument of the state by using it to identify and track dissidents. “It’s Orwellian,” says Jerome Cohen, a New York University law professor and China specialist.
"...Keeping China out of the WTO might have delayed by a few years the damage to U.S. communities from low-cost imports, though it’s not clear that the extra time would have helped. In the 17 years since China’s entry, the U.S. has poured few resources into worker retraining programs or other social safety net programs for laid-off workers. The programs in which it did invest had mixed results.
"“I don’t know that [a defeat for the Clinton WTO deal] would have made a difference,” says David Bonior, a former Democratic House Minority Whip, who led the congressional fight against it.
"Mr. Lighthizer has a different view. The U.S. should go it alone and threaten China with heavy tariffs, he says, largely leaving the WTO out of the mix as an adjudicator of U.S. grievances.
"“The notion that our problems with China can be solved by bringing more cases at the WTO alone is naive at best and at worst distracts policy makers from facing the gravity of the challenge,” his agency said in a January 2018 report. Instead, the USTR said, the U.S. must rely on its own economic muscle.
"“Ultimately, that’s all you have anyway,” Mr. Lighthizer says."
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