C. Rakesh,
Of course you know perfectly well that the EU and the US are not just arguing for concessions, but for China to follow the generally recognized rules of capitalist trade. Your position somehow puts the Chinese government as the defenders of the masses and the EU and US as the bad guys looking to extract more from the noble Reds. I'm saying that's not the case. The Chinese government is by far the more egregious extractor. It is that because it commits capitalist exploitation without offering the protections of bourgeois democracy.
For the Chinese to engage in normal capitalist trade they should have to create a normal bourgeois legal system (or something vaguely resembling one). That would be a vast improvement on their present charade. Obviously the US and EU are not interested in protecting human rights per se but law did not start by protecting human rights. It started by protecting property rights. What I'm saying is that absent a real socialist revolution the Chinese should at least be made to go through a capitalist revolution. Likewise Mexico and all the others. What's totally unacceptable is the social order we've seen develop in Russia where you have capitalist exploitation without even the paltry benefits of bourgeois democracy, as I say.
The reason you have to keep China out of the WTO and the reason that they should not be given permanent normal trading status is not that we don't give worse regimes those benefits. Clearly we deal with worse regimes. The problem is that China is too horrible and *too damn big*. Treating such a large renegade power like a good neighbor is just strategically unwise. China is also too insular. NAFTA opened trade with a crooked, brutal regime but one that was extremely open (compared to China). The coming and going of foreign business probably did help Mexico realign a little and may have helped weaken the PRI a little. I still think the benefit from NAFTA will be very slow coming and the damage has been very rapid. The normalizing of trade relations with Russia has been a total catastrophe. There have been bad shocks in the rest of the former Soviet Bloc. Why do you think that normalizing trade relations with China without weakening the death grip of the military regime will produce a good result? Don't you think China will obviously be vulnerable to things like currency crises and gangsterism? The Chinese are already complaining about rampant corruption.
Right now China is insulated from shocks by the power of the oligarchy and very closed borders - trade and otherwise. A closed China is relatively stable if for no other reason than that the mandarins are force to rob their own house and keep their booty in yuan. That changes fast when you bring in hard currency. You can't open the trade borders and expect China to remain stable so long as its legal/capitalist infrastructure is undeveloped. Otherwise, you let the elite turn their political power directly into real money (not yuan spendable only inside the closed Chinese system) without any safeguards or law. When the underdeveloped capitalist infrastructure of the smaller Asian countries went bad (because it allowed elites to turn influence directly into foreign cash) it caused a near catastrophe. The Russian crash has led to a war and very possibly an authoritarian government. Clearly the wiser course is to put China on a more stable capitalist footing before it's made a normal trading partner. .
Obviously the first world means to front-load this process with specific benefits to multinationals. That's called "business". It's also obvious that the Chinese will try to front-load the process with benefits for the regime. The reality is that masses are not represented by anyone in this contest. Of the two contestants I think the masses are better off with the first world winning. At least the wages are higher here.
I'll turn the question around to you: What's the benefit to the masses if the Red Mandarins are treated like regular businessmen? How does it benefit the revolution for the Chinese nomeklatura to divide up Chinese industry for themselves? Boeing machinists make a hell of a lot more than Chinese aerospace workers do.
peace