Asia Times: China's WTO entry: The gory details



	February 18, 2000	atimes.com

Editorials

China's WTO entry: The gory details

One can't blame a man for his name, we suppose. But this fellow Al Gore has got it coming. For seemingly endless years now, we've seen his pasty, expressionless face lurking in the background whenever US President Bill Clinton made some statement or speech or welcomed foreign visitors to the White House. And we thought of the nondescript vice-president as just a bloody bore. Blood and gore wasn't the image coming to mind. Al just gives the impression of being too slippery or slimy to think of him in martial terms.

But that's precisely the problem with the guy: he doesn't fight his political battles in an up-front manner, but underhandedly and dirtily and so as not to get caught. Take the following news item as an example of how he goes about things in the single-minded and singulary unprincipled pursuit of the presidency: in a Thursday interview, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told USA Today that the 13 million members of his trade union federation would greatly step up their fight against permanent normal trading relations (NTR) status for China now that union leaders had been privately assured by Gore that - if elected president - he would seek additional labor rights and environmental concessions from China if Congress rejected NTR this year. As of immediately, the union federation will launch a major television and radio advertising campaign against the trade agreement with China that Clinton had hammered out late last fall.

Now, mind you, this fellow Gore is Clinton's VP, not just any old dodo running for Congress in a backwater district. But there he is making a backroom deal with union bosses to undermine a piece of legislation that as recently as the Davos World Economic Forum Clinton declared an absolute must and a keystone of his administration's accomplishments. Indeed, while Gore made his sleezy little deal for union votes, the president sat down with a bipartisan group of legislators favoring China's WTO entry as negotiated to develop strategy for what he expects to be one of his toughest fights. So much for loyalty and principle.

Of course, Clinton himself is not exactly known for such qualities of character, and hence we cannot entirely exclude that there is a further backroom deal between him and Gore to help the latter's presidential ambitions - something like, ''Go right ahead, Al, and do what you must.'' But in this case we actually doubt it.

Well, let Al be Al, and let's hope American voters have the good sense not to elect an unsavory character like that president. Meanwhile, stubbornly stupid union members may want to take a look at a just published study by the Congressional Research Service which estimates that the US-China trade agreement could generate $11.5 billion in additional US exports by 2005 and could also boost US direct investment in mainland China by $2.4 billion. To anyone in his right mind, that combination of mutual benefits should certainly appear as a win-win situation and result in the creation of, rather than lead to the loss of, American jobs. But union leaders will more likely hit upon the cautionary clauses of the congressional report warning that ''Past US agreements with China on market access, prison labor exports, textile quotas and protection of intellectual property rights produced mixed results in terms of compliance,'' and that ''In addition, China might lower some barriers but then erect new ones.''

We won't argue that the congressional researchers have no basis for their cautions. We will merely point out that when it comes to erecting sneaky trade barriers the US Department of Commerce is no slouch either. More importantly, we will point out that under the WTO agreement China undertakes to cut tariffs to 17 percent from an overall average of 22.1 percent at present and to phase out virtually all quotas and other trade barriers within five years. With that - and even if there is some occasional backsliding - the benefits from the agreement to both the US and China will likely be much larger than the congressional study predicts.

No one can guarantee that reason will prevail in a US election year. NTR may not pass when it comes up for vote in June or July. But at least we hope that American voters will see through the latest petty Al Gore gambit and not reward him for such dirty little tricks.