Dangerous Liaisons: Progressives, the Right, and the Anti-China Trade Campaign
By Walden Bello and Anuradha Mittal* Institute for Food and Development Policy May 2000
[ Part 1 of 2 ]
Like the United States, China is a country that is full of contradictions. It is certainly not a country that can be summed up as "a rogue nation that decorates itself with human rights abuses as if they were medals of honor."1 This characterization by AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney joins environmentalist Lester Brown's Cassandra-like warnings about the Chinese people in hitting a new low in the rhetoric of the Yellow Peril tradition in American populist politics. Brown accuses the Chinese of being the biggest threat to the world's food supply because they are climbing up the food chain by becoming meat-eaters.2
These claims are disconcerting. At other times, we may choose not to engage their proponents. But not today, when they are being bandied about with studied irresponsibility to reshape the future of relations between the world's most populous nation and the world's most powerful one.
A coalition of forces seeks to deprive China of permanent normal trading relations (PNTR) as a means of obstructing that country's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). We do not approve of the free-trade paradigm that underpins NTR status. We do not support the WTO; we believe, in fact, that it would be a mistake for China to join it. But the real issue in the China debate is not the desirability or undesirability of free trade and the WTO. The real issue is whether the United States has the right to serve as the gatekeeper to international organizations such as the WTO. More broadly, it is whether the United States government can arrogate to itself the right to determine who is and who is not a legitimate member of the international community. The issue is unilateralism--the destabilizing thrust that is Washington's oldest approach to the rest of the world.
The unilateralist anti-China trade campaign enmeshes many progressive groups in the US in an unholy alliance with the right wing that, among other things, advances the Pentagon's grand strategy to contain China. It splits a progressive movement that was in the process of coming together in its most solid alliance in years. It is, to borrow Omar Bradley's characterization of the Korean War, "the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time."
The Real China
To justify US unilateralism vis-a-vis China, opponents of NTR for China have constructed an image of China that could easily have come out of the pen of Joseph McCarthy.
But what really is China? Since the anti-China lobby has done such a good job telling us about China's bad side, it might be appropriate to begin by showing the other side.
Many in the developing world admire China for being one of the world's most dynamic economies, growing between 7-10 per cent a year over the past decade. Its ability to push a majority of the population living in abject poverty during the Civil War period in the late forties into decent living conditions in five decades is no mean achievement. That economic dynamism cannot be separated from an event that most countries in the global South missed out on: a social revolution in the late forties and early fifties that eliminated the worst inequalities in the distribution of land and income and prepared the country for economic takeoff when market reforms were introduced into the agricultural sector in the late 1970's.
China likewise underlines a reality that many in the North, who are used to living under powerful states that push the rest of the world around, fail to appreciate: this is the critical contribution of a liberation movement that decisively wrests control of the national economy from foreign interests. China is a strong state, born in revolution and steeled in several decades of wars hot and cold. Its history of state formation accounts for the difference between China and other countries of the South, like Thailand, Brazil, Nigeria, and South Korea. In this it is similar to that other country forged in revolution, Vietnam.
Foreign investors can force many other governments to dilute their investment rules to accommodate them. That is something they find difficult to do in China and Vietnam, which are prepared to impose a thousand and one restrictions to make sure that foreign capital indeed contributes to development, from creating jobs to actually transferring technology.
The Pentagon can get its way in the Philippines, Korea, and even Japan. These are, in many ways, vassal states. In contrast, it is very careful when it comes to dealing with China and Vietnam, both of whom taught the US that bullying doesn't pay during the Korean War and the Vietnam War, respectively.
Respect is what China and Vietnam gets from transnationals and Northern governments. Respect is what most of our governments in the global South don't get. When it comes to pursuing national interests, what separates China and Vietnam from most of our countries are successful revolutionary nationalist movements that got institutionalized into no-nonsense states.
What is the "Case" against China?
Of course, China has problems when it comes to issues such as its development model, the environment, workers rights, human rights and democracy. But here the record is much more complex than the picture painted by many US NGO's.
- The model of development of outward -oriented growth built on exports to developed country markets of labor-intensive products is no scheme to destroy organized labor thought up by an evil regime. This is the model that has been prescribed for over two decades by the World Bank and other Western-dominated development institutions for the developing countries. When China joined the World Bank in the early eighties, this was the path to development recommended by the officials and experts of that institution.
Through the strategic manipulation of aid, loans, and the granting of the stamp of approval for entry into world capital markets, the Bank pushed export-oriented, labor-intensive manufacturing and discouraged countries from following domestic-market-oriented growth based on rising wages and incomes. In this connection, it must be pointed out that World Bank policies vis-Ö-vis China and the Third World were simply extensions of policies in the US, Britain, and other countries in the North, where the Keynesian or Social Democratic path based on rising wages and incomes was foreclosed by the anti-labor, pro-capitalist neoliberal policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and their ideological allies.
- True, development in China has been accompanied by much environmental destruction and must be criticized. But what many American environmentalists forget is that the model of double-digit GDP growth based on resource-intensive, waste-intensive, toxic-intensive production and unrestrained levels of consumption is one that China and other developing countries have been enouraged to copy from the North, where it continues to be the dominant paradigm. Again, the World Bank and the whole Western neoclassical economics establishment, which has equated development with unchecked levels of consumption, must bear a central part of the blame.
Northern environmentalists love to portray China as representing the biggest future threat to the global environment. They assume that China will simply emulate the unrestrained consumer-is-king model of the US and the North. What they forget to mention is that per capita consumption in China is currently just one tenth of that of developed countries.3 What they decline to point out is that the US, with five per cent of the world's population, is currently the biggest single source of global climate change, accounting as it does for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. As the Center for Science and Environment (CSE) points out, the carbon emission level of one US citizen in 1996 was equal to that of 19 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 17 Maldivians, 49 Sri Lankans, 107 Bangladeshis, 134 Bhutanese, or 269 Nepalis.4
When it comes to food consumption, Lester Brown's picture of Chinese meat eaters and milk consumers destabilizing food supply is simply ethnocentric, racist, and wrong. According to FAO data, China's consumption of meat in 1992-94 was 33 kg per capita and this is expected to rise to 60 kg per capita in 2020. In contrast, the comparable figures for developed countries was 76 kg per capita in 1992-94, rising to 83 kg in 2020. When it comes to milk, China's consumption was 7 kg per capita in 1992-94, rising marginally to 12 kg in 2020. Per capita consumption in developed countries, in contrast was 195 kg and declining only marginally to 189 kg in 2020.5
The message of these two sets of figures is unambiguous: the unchecked consumption levels in the United States and other Northern countries continue to be the main destabilizer of the global environment.
- True, China is no workers' paradise. Yet it is simplistic to say that workers have no rights, or that the government has, in the manner of a pimp, delivered its workers to transnationals to exploit. There are unions; indeed, China has the biggest trade union confederation in the world, with 100 million members. Granted, this confederation is closely linked with the government. But this is also the case in Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and many other countries. The Chinese trade unions are not independent from government, but they ensure that workers' demands and concerns are not ignored by government. If the Chinese government were anti-worker, as AFL-CIO propaganda would have it, it would have dramatically reduced its state enterprise sector by now. It is precisely concern about the future of the hundreds of millions of workers in state enterprises that has made the government resist the prescription to radically dismantle the state enterprise sector coming from Chinese neoliberal economists, foreign investors, the business press, and the US government--all of whom are guided by a narrow efficiency/profitability criterion, and are completely insensitive to the sensitivity to employment issues of the government.
The fact is that workers in China probably have greater protection and access to government than industrial workers who live in right-to-work states (where non-union shops are encouraged by law) in the United States. If there is a government that must be targeted by the AFL-CIO for being anti-labor, it must be its own government, which, in collusion with business, has stripped labor of so many of its traditional legal protections and rights that the proportion of US workers unionized is down to only 13 per cent of the work force!
- True, there is much to be done in terms of bringing genuine democracy and greater respect for human rights in China. And certainly, actions like the Tienanmen massacre and the repression of political dissidents must be condemned, in much the same way that Amnesty International severely criticizes the United States for relying on mass incarceration as a principal mechanism of social control.6But this is not a repressive regime devoid of legitimacy like the Burmese military junta.
As in the United States and other countries, there is a lot of grumbling about government, but this cannot be said to indicate lack of legitimacy on the part of the government. Again and again, foreign observers in China note that while there might be disaffection, there is widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of the government.
Monopolization of decision making by the Communist Party at the regional and national level is still the case, but relatively free elections now take place in many of the country's rural villages in an effort to deconcentrate power from Beijing to better deal with rural economic problems, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who is otherwise quite critical of the Chinese leadership.7
Indeed, lack of Western-style multiparty systems and periodic competitive elections does not mean that the government is not responsive to people. The Communist Party is all too aware of the fact that its continuing in power is dependent on popular legitimacy. This legitimacy in turn depends on convincing the masses that it is doing an adequate job its fulfilling four goals: safeguarding national sovereignty, avoiding political instability, raising people's standard of living, and maintaining the rough tradition of equality inherited from the period of classical socialism. The drama of recent Chinese history has been the way the party has tried to stay in power by balancing these four concerns of the population. This balancing act has been achieved, Asia expert Chalmers Johnson writes, via an "ideological shift from an all-embracing communism to an all-embracing nationalism [that has] helped to hold Chinese society together, giving it a certain intellectual and emotional energy and stability under the intense pressures of economic transformation."8
- As for demand for democratic participation, this is certainly growing and should be strongly supported by people outside China. But it is wishful thinking to claim that US-style forms of democratic expression have become the overwhelming demand of the population. While one might not agree with all the points he makes, a more accurate portrayal of the state of things than that given by the anti-China lobby is provided by the English political philosopher John Gray in his classic work False Dawn:
China's current regime is undoubtedly transitional, but rather than moving towards "democratic capitalism," it is evolving from the western, Soviet institutions of the past into a modern state more suited to Chinese traditions, needs, and circumstances. Liberal democracy is not on the historical agenda for China. It is very doubtful if the one-child policy, which even at present is often circumvented, could survive a transition to liberal democracy. Yet, as China's present rulers rightly believe, an effective population policy is indispensable if scarcity of resources is not to lead to ecological catastrophe and political crisis. Popular memories of the collapse of the state and national defenselessness between the world wars are such that any experiment with political liberalization which appears to carry the risk of near-anarchy of post-Soviet Russia will be regarded with suspicion or horror by the majority of Chinese. Few view the break-up of the state other than a supreme evil. The present regime has a potent source of popular legitimacy in the fact that so far it has staved off that disaster.
[ This article continues in Part 2 ]
For the full article, visit the Food First website at: http://www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/2000/5-china.html