WASHINGTON—Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and former Republican Congressman Frank Wolf were in total agreement as witnesses at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) hearing on March 1. Both had been vigorous, vocal opponents of granting Normal Trade Relations with China that was promoted by the Clinton Administration and paved the way for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in Dec. 2001.
Pelosi and Wolf warned again during the Bush Administration that supporting China’s accession to the WTO without preconditions would be a mistake.
Congressman Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chairman of the CECC, lent his voice too in those days urging resistance to the argument that increased trade would open the pathway to gradual political liberalization and the rule of law. In his opening statement, Smith said granting China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with the idea that more trade and investment would bring about political reform and human rights improvement was a “bipartisan fantasy.”
“Bill Clinton predicted that trade would open China’s political system. Chinese democracy was ‘inevitable, just like when the Berlin Wall fell.’ George W. Bush also focused on the inevitability of history saying ’trade freely with China and time is on our side,'” said Smith in a statement made part of the hearing’s record in his absence.
The far-reaching claims concerning the effect of trade prompted James Mann to write “The China Fantasy,” published in 2007. Mann testified at the hearing that he argued back then that “the Chinese regime wasn’t going to change in the way that American leaders said it would.” He questioned the assumption that China’s authoritarian rule would not last much longer.
Mann said that China, now richer, had in the past few years entered “into new types of repression: arresting lawyers, severely restricting NGOs, and staging televised confessions of those who are detained.”
Wolf said that he thought it a bit curious that a mere ten years after the brutal slaughter of Tiananmen protesters, prior to the passage of PNTR in 2000, “a school of thought took root which argued for increased trade and economic ties, as opposed to sanctions and a tough line.”
“The push for PNTR was borne, I believe, of wishful thinking rather than evidence or a genuine understanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s goals and objectives,” Wolf said.
