Bid to Punish China on Trade Dies in Senate

A largely symbolic effort to punish China with higher import tariffs for repressing pro-democracy demonstrators faltered early today as the Senate missed a deadline to vote on the measure.

The House voted 247 to 174 Thursday to immediately suspend China’s trade status as a “most-favored nation.” The vote was aimed at reversing President Bush’s decision in May to keep the present low tariffs on Chinese imports through next June.

Under a trade law enacted in August, however, the Senate also would have had to pass the resolution by midnight Thursday. Bush was expected to veto the measure anyway, and the two houses lacked the two-thirds margin needed to override his veto.

Lifting the most-favored-nation trade status--granted to China a decade ago--would increase tariffs on its exports to the United States tenfold, drastically reducing the $18 billion in two-way trade last year.

Before the Senate missed the deadline, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the House vote “will exert destructive impacts on the economic and trade relations between the two countries and will surely result in a serious slide back of the bilateral relations.”

The Senate spent all Thursday night working on its deficit-reduction plan. At midnight, Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) pronounced the effort to curtail trade with the Chinese dead for the year.

“I continue to believe that the President’s renewal of this special trade status is wrong,” he said early today. “It is a signal to the Chinese leadership and the watching world that the United States views its brutal human rights violations with complacency.”