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dam-l Dangerous liasons: Progressives, the Right, and the Anti-China Trade



Campaign (Part I)
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To: fianusa-news@igc.topica.com
From: Anuradha Mittal <amittal@foodfirst.org
Subject: Anti-China Trade Campaign - Part 1 of 2
Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 10:21:30 -0700
Reply-To: amittal@foodfirst.org
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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-Ö-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-Ö-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 Tiananmen 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