Keep the Doors to China Wide Open

I have heard on the news that two of the groups I admire most in the United States--the AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club--are against granting permanent normal trade relations status with China. They both organized large-scale activities, including mass demonstrations, to make their statements to American policymakers and to the public.

As a Chinese environmentalist and human rights activist, I disagree with their position, although I am fully sympathetic with their causes.

It is public knowledge that China is among the worst violators of labor rights and basic environmental standards. Walking on almost any street in almost any city, one can easily spot such violations: unemployed workers selling their old stuff, hoping to put some food on their family dinner tables; migrant workers sleeping under bridges and in construction sites, willing to take any job for a roof over their heads; water resources highly polluted by industrial waste; suffocating industrial pollution. Most government officials at all levels are so corrupt that they have become part of the pollution.

The disagreement between me, together with many of my fellow human rights activists and environmentalists in China, and our counterparts in the U.S. is not over the principles of environmental protection and labor rights. Rather, the disagreement is with the means of improving human rights, including labor rights, implementing environmental protection and promoting democracy and freedom.

I believe that permanent normal trade status, with its implication of openness and fairness, is among the most powerful means of promoting freedom in China.

Wei Jingsheng, a prominent dissident now residing in the U.S., argues that in order to improve human rights conditions in China, the international community must constantly put pressure on the Chinese government. Wei is absolutely right about the international pressure, but he is wrong when he suggests that annual renewal of normal trade relations should be taken as an opportunity to provide such pressure.

How does international pressure work in promoting human rights and environmental protection in China? I would like to argue that such pressure works only when doors are kept open, when pressure presents positive solutions and, above all, when engagement is involved.

After the communist takeover in 1949, China was cut off from the rest of the world until it began to open up in the late 1970s. Millions of people starved to death or were persecuted, executed or otherwise deprived of the most basic human rights. International pressure either did not exist or did not work because the outside world had little information about what was happening. China had no need to respond to the international community.

Starting in 1978, the open-door policy completely changed the way China responded to the world. Today, permanent normal trade relations is a powerful means to keep China’s doors as open as possible.

International pressure works better by providing positive solutions. Poverty promotes ignorance and negligence among the public to environmental issues and human rights abuses. With prevalent poverty in today’s China, the government runs a successful propaganda campaign that argues that the right of economic survival overrides other human rights. The Chinese people are looking for positive support from the international community, especially the industrialized world. Permanent normal trade relations would send the Chinese people a powerful and positive message: The most powerful industrialized nation today will work with the Chinese people to build a new world order. This would put enormous pressure on both the government and the general public to meet the international standard not only on trade, but also on other issues, including human rights and environmental protection.

International pressure works best when engagement is implemented. An American congressman once made the point that because China was not a normal state, it made no sense to treat it normally. Yet if the international community does not treat China normally, China will remain abnormal.

Wei compares the annual renewal of trade status to the periodic renewal of a driver’s license, which keeps China anxious to a certain level. This is exactly the most destructive way of thinking. The U.S. should never take the role of traffic police in world trade because China, or any nation, should not be subject to the naked authority of another nation. Instead, the U.S. should engage China in the process of becoming a full member of the international community. Permanent normal trade status would be an important part of the engagement plan.