China & the WTO & PNTR

Tom Lehman uswa12 at Lorainccc.edu
Mon Mar 20 05:31:46 PST 2000


Mike--Borosage finally stiffened in his opposition to the privatization of social security. It took awhile. But, he got there.

Borosage has a co-worker named Tom Matzzie who is write-on in my opinion too.

Tom Lehman

Michael Pollak wrote:


> There's a Real Audio interview on Bob Borosage's Campaign for America's
> Future site www.ourfuture.org, in which he gives the following account of
> labor's strategy.
>
> In the first place, he agrees that China could legally enter the WTO
> without Congress's approval, but he claims that it originally promised not
> to, whence the importance of the fight. To this he quickly added that of
> course it could break its promise, as it had every previous promise it had
> ever made on trade, which was a big theme of his. But he argued, PNTR was
> actually more important to China that WTO accession. He said that the main
> reason China was entering the WTO in the first place was in order to win
> PNTR, which it wanted in order to reassure American investors that if they
> built factories in China, American markets would be permanently open to
> them.
>
> Secondly, he said that if China went back on its word, and entered the WTO
> without winning PNTR, the anti-PNTR side had lots of lawyers ready to
> claim that so long as China got NTR, even on an annual renewal basis,
> there was no basis for it to claim discrimination, and if it did, it would
> be tied up in WTO court for quite a while. In other words, we could
> safely deal with that bridge when we came to it.
>
> Overall, if anyone's in the mood to listen to the radio, I thought it was
> a pretty interesting joint interview. Borosage's rhetoric is
> overwhelmingly about how China has to be punished for not opening up its
> markets and continuing to run a trade surplus with the US. But this
> apparently fierce mercantilism becomes slightly more complex as it becomes
> clear that his underlying image of US-China trade is that "Chinese" firms
> are really US firms that have left here to make stuff and sell it back to
> us. One of the guys I thought at first was a pro-business flack turned
> out to have a pretty unyieldingly damning first-hand account of Chinese
> working conditions. And in general, there were some interesting
> cross-currents. It's an episode of the Diane Rehm show on NPR.
>
> Michael
>
> __________________________________________________________________________
> Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com



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