Debate on Trade Benefits for China Usually Clouded by Myths, Excuses

It’s springtime, the season for the annual congressional debate about China. Get ready to hear the usual myths and rationalizations about the nature of the world’s largest country.

Each year, Congress wrangles over whether to attach some conditions on China’s most-favored-nation trade benefits (or to revoke the benefits completely) to further the causes of human rights and democracy inside China.

And each year, American political leaders and corporate executives, as well as Hong Kong visitors, manage to come up with elaborate political and moral justifications why Congress should not try to do anything to ease China’s continuing political repression.

It wouldn’t be objectionable if the proponents of unlimited MFN benefits for China were straightforward. Some year, they might come to Capitol Hill saying, “We ought to renew MFN for China because it is in our commercial [or strategic] interest to do so. Please renew MFN because revoking it would clobber us in the pocketbook.”

That would be a serious, honest argument. And if the proponents of unrestricted MFN benefits for China made their case in this way, the public and members of Congress could then make their own decisions. For many people, commercial interests are extremely important; for others, less so.

But no. Unfortunately, many of the MFN proponents go much further. They often advance several broader arguments about why it’s silly for the United States to bother about human rights and democracy in China. Sweeping claims are made about the nature of the Chinese people, China’s recent history and the rest of Asia.

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These arguments are mostly shallow and shortsighted, yet they have become conventional wisdom among the foreign policy elite and the American business community.

Let’s look at the three biggest rationalizations.

Rationalization No. 1: The Chinese people only care about getting rich, and not about political freedom.

The argument goes like this: It’s useless for Americans to talk about human rights in China today because the Chinese people themselves only care about economic prosperity, not political freedom or democracy. The only people in China who care about politics are dissidents, and they are in jail or exile or have lost their following.

The main problem with this broad claim is that it lacks any awareness at all of China’s topsy-turvy history of the past few decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, Americans were told in just as sweeping terms that the Chinese people cared only about making revolution and not about material things.

So too in Deng Xiaoping’s early years, China was supposed to have set itself on a course of deep respect for education and expertise. In the late 1980s, Americans believed that Chinese people cared only about the Goddess of Liberty. Now we’re supposed to believe that they care only about money, not politics.

Doesn’t that suggest that our simplistic American view of what the Chinese people “want” changes regularly? Isn’t it possible that, like people elsewhere in the world, the Chinese want lots of different things?

The fact that people in China aren’t talking about politics right now doesn’t mean they aren’t interested. They know that under present conditions, the leadership in Beijing is tolerant of lifestyles and economic activity, but is severely repressive when faced with the slightest sign of political dissent.

History shows that whenever Chinese are allowed to express political opinions--in the years before the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, at the time of the Democracy Wall protests in 1979, or even in Mao Tse-tung’s Hundred Flowers campaign in 1957--they rush to do so. In a sense, claiming that Chinese don’t care about politics is a form of cultural bias, if not racism. Would Americans really have believed that Poles or Russians, under communism, cared only about economic prosperity and not about politics?

Rationalization No. 2: Things are so much better now.

The argument goes like this: Americans shouldn’t bother so much about human rights and democracy in China because the country is getting freer and more open--far more so than in the early 1970s, at the time of President Nixon’s and Henry A. Kissinger’s rapprochement with Beijing.

President Bush used to regularly make this point: that things are much better today than they were when he headed the U.S. liaison office in Beijing in 1974-75.

But judging China against the early 1970s establishes a misleading baseline. The more meaningful comparison is with China a decade ago. People in China are considerably less free to engage in direct political activity, or to criticize their own government, than they were in the 1980s.

Sure, people in China may be permitted to make money and to wear whatever clothes they want; that means they are free only as long as they stay out of politics. This was the long-term impact of the Tiananmen Square repression.

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Using the Nixon-Kissinger era as a standard for comparison is particularly cruel and ironic because many of the American participants in the 1970s rapprochement now admit they had little grasp of the political situation inside China at the time. They thought the Cultural Revolution was over, when it wasn’t.

In effect, they are telling us now that things were terrible in China back then, although they didn’t seem to care or pay much attention back then either.

Rationalization No. 3: China will inevitably open up its political system, just as Taiwan and South Korea did.

According to this argument, Americans shouldn’t waste their time worrying about human rights and democracy in China because it is inevitable that the country will eventually become more open and politically free, following the path of previously authoritarian Taiwan and South Korea. Economic prosperity leads to the development of a middle class and then eventually to democracy.

But China is much bigger than Taiwan or South Korea. Chinese officials themselves used to regularly remind visitors of that fact to help explain why Taiwan was so much richer than China. Their point was right: There is no reason to think China’s development will follow along the path of smaller, more controllable entities.

If China were just Shanghai, or just Guangdong province, it would be easier to believe such claims of inevitable change. But China has a huge interior, with minority regions and impoverished areas. There are five times as many people just in China’s largest province, Sichuan, as there are in Taiwan. What comparison can really be valid between Taiwan or South Korea and all of China?

The assumption that China will automatically follow the path from prosperity to democracy diverts Americans from thinking about a far more unsettling possibility: that China may become prosperous but stay repressive.

These three rationalizations prevent Americans from coming to grips with the many dilemmas America faces in dealing with China today. They are tawdry efforts to find an excuse for doing nothing. If Chinese people themselves don’t really desire a say over their own lives, if the political situation is getting better and better, if China is inevitably on the road to political reform, then there is no need for America to do anything about the lack of human rights. Unfortunately, none of these assumptions is valid.

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The discussion about China’s trade privileges shouldn’t get tangled up with such broad and silly arguments. America does have commercial and strategic interests in China, and the country ought to debate how much these interests should be weighed in U.S. policy. There is also a legitimate tactical question about whether restricting MFN benefits is the best way to help the cause of human rights in China.

This year, for once, it would be nice to hear the MFN debate without all the excuses and mythology about China that usually come along with it.

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.