Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Human rights must be an important dimension of any American policy toward China that truly addresses Chinese problems and is sensitive to the Chinese record in particular cases. Such a policy is best implemented by trained and experienced diplomats, not by politicians speaking in generalities to domestic audiences for political advantage. Inevitably, demands for political reform will grow in China over time, just as they have in Taiwan and South Korea, so long as the regime’s basic policies remain what they are today. In the meantime, the U.S. government should exercise patience and firmness, while discreetly intervening in particular cases where we might make a difference.

The second aspect of human rights in China we must recognize is to ensure that poor working conditions and prison labor in China (and elsewhere) do not end up destroying the livelihoods of American workers. Without question the most powerful human rights tool the United States could wield would be to deny access to the American market to products from multinational companies that have abandoned American workers to seek out low-wage foreign workers lacking in economic or political rights of any sort, not to speak of human rights. The economics profession may attack such policies as “protectionism,” but the time is long past when the United States should allow corporations to use the bottom line, “globalization,” or the pressures of competition—”Adam Smith made me do it”—as excuses for their indifference to basic human rights at home or abroad. Failure to consider this dimension of the rights question leaves the United States open to a charge of hypocrisy.

The United States is formally as well as emotionally and intellectually committed to an academic textbook definition of “free trade,” which it believes (or pretends to believe) was the foundation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Created in 1948 as a specialized agency of the United Nations, GATT governed trade among the so-called free-market economies during the era of the Cold War. Its greatest accomplishments were a series of multilateral negotiations among its members to reduce or eliminate tariffs on many different products, which greatly stimulated international trade over the years. It was replaced on January 1, 1995, by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Actually, for most of the Cold War, GATT was part of an American grand strategy vis-à-vis the USSR in which the United States traded access to its market and its technologies in return for support against communism by nations like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The WTO has no similar strategic purpose; it must either deliver the allegedly mutual benefits of free trade or else it is a menace to the livelihoods of all working Americans. Far too often free trade has meant in practice free access to the American market for foreign products but American toleration of closed foreign markets regardless of the damage this has done to U.S. industries and good jobs in manufacturing.

China’s primary trade goal is to gain admission to the WTO with the status of a developing country. As a developing country, China would not have to open its markets to foreign competitors on an equal basis and would be exempt from the provisions of the WTO treaty concerning national subsidies for industries and intellectual property rights covering items like foreign films and books. If it achieves that—as the ideological myopia of American trade negotiators of both parties and the economists who advise them makes likely—its mercantilism will ultimately do serious damage to the American economy, not to speak of the WTO system. Like Japan before it, China will run up huge trade surpluses with the United States rather than generating a balanced and mutually beneficial trade. Managed trade is the antidote to this, and it need not hamper China’s economic development, but it is anathema to the economic ideologists of the United States. Management of trade with China would require the kind of political leadership and a governmental capability that the country may simply not be able to muster in the post–Cold War world. After all, the United States has never given the same priority to trade as to human rights, arms sales, or territorial disputes.