Essay; The Biggest Vote

By William Safire
The New York Times, 18 May 2000

The most far-reaching vote any representative will cast this year will take place next week. It will be on the bill to permanently guarantee that Congress will have no economic leverage to restrain China’s internal repression of dissidents or external aggression against Taiwan.

Bill Clinton, architect of the discredited “strategic partnership” with Beijing, is lobbying for H.R. 4444 as part of his legacy thing. His strange bedfellow is the G.O.P. leadership, fairly slavering at the prospect of heavy contributions from U.S. companies that want to profit from building up China’s industrial and electronic strength.

Clinton has been purchasing Democratic votes one by one. The latest convert to pulling the U.S. teeth is Charles Rangel of New York, who was seduced by last week’s legislation to benefit African workers at the expense of Chinese laborers in sweatshops at slave wages. He is the ranking Democrat on Ways and Means, which yesterday voted to send the any-behavior-goes bill to the House floor.

The president’s tactics include frightening Americans with “dangerous confrontation and constant insecurity” from angry China if his appeasement is not passed.

He also divides American farmers from workers with his mantra, “exports mean jobs.” Of course they do; in the past decade, our trade deficit with China has ballooned from $7 billion to $70 billion. That means China’s exports to the U.S. have created hundreds of thousands of jobs — in China. Clinton’s trade deficit is certainly not creating net jobs for Americans.

His trade negotiator, Charlene Barshefsky, has become increasingly shrill, turning truth on its head this week by telling Lally Weymouth of The Washington Post that “organized labor, human rights advocates and some environmentalists have aligned themselves with the Chinese army and hard-liners in Beijing who do not want accession for China.”

Not to be outdone in twisting the truth and kowtowing to Communists, Republican investors and the Asia establishment assure us that only by abandoning yearly review of China’s rights abuses and diplomatic conduct can we encourage democracy there.

I confess to writing speeches for Richard Nixon assuring conservatives that trade with China would lead to the evolution of democratic principles in Beijing. But we’ve been trading for 30 years now, financing its military-industrial base, enabling it to buy M-11 missiles from the Russians and advanced computer technology from us.

Has our strengthening of their regime brought political freedom? Ask the Falun Gong, jailed by the thousands for daring to organize; ask the Tibetans, their ancient culture destroyed and nation colonized; ask the Taiwanese, who face an escalation of the military threat against them after the U.S. Congress spikes its cannon of economic retaliation.

Before Nixon died, I asked him — on the record — if perhaps we had gone a bit overboard on selling the American public on the political benefits of increased trade. That old realist, who had played the China card to exploit the split in the Communist world, replied with some sadness that he was not as hopeful as he had once been: “We may have created a Frankenstein.”

(I was on the verge of correcting him that Dr. Frankenstein was the creator, and that he meant “Frankenstein’s monster,” but I bit my tongue.)

To provide a face-saver for Democrats uncomfortable with forever removing Scoop Jackson’s economic pressure, Clinton’s bipartisan allies have cooked up a toothless substitute: a committee to cluck-cluck loudly when China cracks down and acts up. We already have a State Department annual report that does that, to no effect on a China whose transgressions have always been waived.

Human rights advocates know the smart money in Washington is betting on the appeasers. Our only hope is that the undecideds in Congress consider that unemployment in their districts will not always be under 4 percent, and that when recession or aggression bites, voters will not forget who threw away economic restraints on China.