Why the Debate? The Outcome Was Clear: Business as Usual : China: MFN renewal was a given; ‘market Stalinism’ will proceed, helped by a new law to stifle social pluralism.
The debate over renewing China’s most-favored-nation trading status, now mercifully concluded, illustrated nicely how noisy policy debates often have the uncanny knack of missing the central point. It had been apparent for at least six months that President Clinton had no intention of canceling MFN, which he duly renewed Thursday. The only real question was what blend of nit-picking, spin-doctoring and face-saving would shape the final decision. Would Clinton opt to delink trade and human rights, or would he try to claim, in the teeth of all the evidence, that China had indeed made the “significant, overall progress” on human rights demanded in his executive order of May 28, 1993?
Even though the outcome was never really in doubt--the Fortune 500 having a much larger arsenal to deploy than human-rights groups on shoestring budgets--the debate consumed policy-makers and pundits for many weeks. Yet the most curious feature of the debate was that no one in the pro-MFN lobby ever seriously contested the facts presented by the human-rights community. Belief in human rights has become universal, at least at the rhetorical level; no one would speak out against human rights in public any more than they would demand the reintroduction of slavery. Rather than challenge the facts, then, business lobbyists presented their belief in human rights with a simple argument, repeated like a mantra: More trade and economic freedom in China will loosen central controls, creating new social groups and classes that will then express their interests politically. In shorthand, MFN is the best vehicle for bringing about democracy and human rights.
Now, this mantra may be disingenuous, and it may be that corporate eyes have become so glazed by the double-digit growth rates in the new China that they will say anything, even aver a love of human rights, in order to keep the profits flowing. Even so, their arguments must appear plausible to many people. It is an article of the secular American faith, after all, that political liberty follows economic freedom as surely as night follows day.
The Chinese government, however, has embarked on a course of social engineering, visionary in its own perverted way, that proposes to break this linkage. It is curious that the MFN debate should have missed this point, since the Chinese government has hardly been shy about declaring its intentions. Deng Xiaoping’s entire reform strategy has been predicated on the belief that China can modernize its economy without any corresponding increase in political freedom. This is something that no country has pulled off before, or at least none larger than Singapore. Some have called it market Stalinism.
In China, like anywhere else, economic freedom will of course breed the desire, as well as the structural basis, for political pluralism. But the point is that the Chinese government is determined to short-circuit that logic. This is what it means when it pleads for foreign understanding of China’s need for “stability.” To advocates of MFN, “stability” is understood as the necessary precondition for a free society; to Beijing, “stability” is the permanent state to be created by crushing any flickering of democratic activity.
The 1989 Beijing massacre was, among other things, an illustration of how far the Chinese will go in order to square this circle. But they have learned many lessons from Tian An Men Square, the most important of which is never again to let things reach that advanced and threatening stage. In all the flurry of events and rhetoric that preceded Clinton’s decision on MFN, perhaps the most significant development barely caused a ripple. This was China’s announcement in mid-May that it was amending its public-order law to crack down on “newly emerging public security problems”--a code-phrase for the kind of social pluralism and divergent opinions that have accompanied economic growth and reform.
A list of 18 new offenses includes: “carrying out activities under the name of a social organization without registration” and “fabricating or distorting facts, spreading rumors or otherwise disrupting public order, or doing harm to the public interest through other means.” Under the new regulations, police will have wide powers to use administrative detention or impose other punishments without going through the courts.
The new public-order regulations will affect anyone trying to organize outside Communist Party control, whether religious bodies, support groups for former political prisoners or associations of entrepreneurs. But no one will be worse hit than those trying to monitor human rights inside China. Every effort in this direction has been ruthlessly stamped out. Even as the MFN decision was imminent, Shanghai police were busy rounding up members of the underground Assn. for Human Rights.
China already possesses a formidable array of laws to deny its citizens the right of free association. These new regulations will allow for dissent to be stifled even more comprehensively. In renewing MFN, Clinton vowed to support human-rights advocates in China. If this promise is to mean anything, Washington should immediately confront Beijing over its laws barring free association.
In a way it is a relief to have these annual bouts of arm-wrestling over MFN out of the way. China has proved adept at the last-minute prisoner-release game, and the debate would now benefit by switching to more long-term criteria for determining whether China intends ever to respect basic human rights and the rule of law. There are many ways to measure this, but the ability of Chinese human-rights monitors to operate freely, and to report to the outside world on their findings, is one obvious place to start.
