[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 68 (Thursday, May 26, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: May 26, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
FOCUSSING MFN FOR CHINA ON UNITED STATES INTERESTS
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HON. DAVID DREIER
of california
in the house of representatives
Thursday, May 26, 1994
Mr. DREIER. Mr. Speaker, within the next few days, President Clinton
is going to make an announcement regarding our Nation's economic and
political relations with China. Namely, he will decide whether to
maintain normal trade relations with the most populace country in the
world, and the third largest economy.
The China MFN debate has now raged for 5 years. During that time,
China's economy has roared ahead, placing it squarely in the center of
the Asian growth region. In addition, the bipolar cold war ended,
dramatically changing the political and security environment in Asia.
Finally, there has been a growing recognition here in the United States
that economic and strategic relations with the countries of Asia and
the Pacific rim are increasingly critical to our future prosperity and
security.
I would like to place in the Record at this point a short essay by
Amos A. Jordan, president of Pacific Forum CSIS, which touches on the
different national interests that must be weighed if a sound decision
is to be made regarding relations with China.
May 16, 1994
Framing the China MFN Question Sensibly
As the June 3 deadline approaches for deciding whether or
not China's Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status should
continue, the rancorous debate is increasingly off the point.
The matter is being wrongly cast as a choice between our
commercial interests and human rights ideals. This not only
unnecessarily forces an impossible choice, but also evades
the real point.
The real issue is whether denial of normal trading
relations with China (and normality is what MFN amounts to)
will advance or weaken vital American interests. Congressman
Lee Hamilton rightly identified the relevant key question:
will China ``move toward adherence to international norms of
behavior--whether the issue is trade, nonproliferation, or
human rights--and be a force for stability in East Asia; or
become the hegemonic power in East Asia, enforcing its will
with military threats and playing a dangerous balance of
power game in South Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle
East.'' Our policies can influence the choice.
Of course, United States policy on MFN will not determine
China's future, despite continuing illusions of American
omnipotence in some quarters--indeed, rather than isolating
China by our unilateral actions, there is a greater
likelihood we will isolate ourselves. Nevertheless, in the
short run at least, China's economic and political prospects
will be powerfully influenced by American policy. We need,
therefore, to think carefully about the nature of our overall
relationship with China as we make the MFN decision. As
former Secretary of State Vance and others have said, we
cannot let the extraordinarily important and complex
Chinese-American relationship be dominated by a single
factor.
Looking at the totality of our interests in China, it is
clear that the international security ramifications of our
relationship with Beijing are important, perhaps vital; yet
these are seldom even mentioned in the hubbub about the
supposed economic interest-human rights tradeoff. China is
already a major regional actor with increasing power
projection capabilities and a military modernization effort
that profoundly worries its neighbors. Beijing's cooperation
on a number of issues is important such as the North Korean
nuclear problem, missile proliferation, nuclear weapons
testing, proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons, etc. Thus, the whole complex U.S.-China
relationship--with its global ramifications--needs to be
placed on the balance beam, not just our commercial
interests, important as those are.
Revoking China's MFN status will undoubtedly hurt China,
for the U.S. is its largest market; it will particularly
damage the modernizing elements in Southeast China and Hong
Kong that are the leading exporters and the best hope for
building a less repressive China. Retaliation by China is
certain, with a resultant downward spiral in the overall
relationship clearly predictable. In the current era of
economic interdependence, the cost to the United States will
also be substantial--the World Bank estimates it will cost
American consumers about $14 billion a year. Revocation
could cost some two hundred thousand U.S. jobs and entail
foregoing major opportunities for American trade and
investment for years to come.
We might usefully ask why it is that most Asians take
China's side in the matter of human rights. Perhaps it is in
part because other nations resent American preaching. As
Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew put it in the context of the caning
incident, the United States should not be moralizing about
human rights in other nations, when American citizens have to
cope with ``drugs, violence, unemployment and homelessness''
because Washington will not recognize that the ``government
must protect society.'' In part, Asian's may also align
themselves with China because they understand the
extraordinary challenge of leading a country of 1.2 billion
people, of averting unrest by the hundreds of millions of
unemployed or underemployed and the additional hundreds of
millions that have been hit heavily by the shift to a market
economy. Given such a challenge, they may reason, a
Jeffersonian approach to governing is likely to produce chaos
with spills-over into its neighbors' territories; Tiananmen
was indefensible, but not inexplicable.
As long as China's human rights record remains poor, we can
and should continue to press for improvements, preferably in
multilateral channels and by diplomatic means. The most
promising strategy lies not in sanctions but in broadening
China's opening to the West. We have a major stake in not
choking that opening and in seeing that China's reforms
succeed--in part because, as Senator Baucus has argued, ``the
most significant human rights developments in China have come
as natural results of economic reform rather than from
American pressure.''
The threat of revocation has resulted in some limited
success in the past, but the Chinese now appear ready to call
our hand. Since actual revocation serves no one's interests,
the time has clearly come for President Clinton to delink MFN
from human rights--he can rightly claim that there has been
some progress but that the linkage has served its purposes
and is now outmoded. Then, he and the nation can turn to the
needed fundamental reexamination of the entire US-China
relationship and how best to advance the totality of our
interests within that relationship.
Amos A. Jordan.
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