The China trade goes the way of the pandas
Tim Carney
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China took back its pandas last week, which is fitting.
Mei Xiang and Tian Tian arrived in Washington’s National Zoo in 2000, the year a Republican Congress and Democratic President Bill Clinton welcomed China into the World Trade Organization, promising this would make China freer and friendlier.
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As we sent the couple and their cub back on Nov. 8, it was clear that the 23-year-old “China trade” was a bad one for the people of China, the American worker, and the cause of freedom and democracy.
In 2000, we granted permanent normal trade relations status to China and welcomed it into the WTO. We knew this would send American manufacturing to China and fuel a trade deficit. Our politicians and commentators told us that, in return, we would get lower-cost goods and a massive new market for U.S. companies. More importantly, welcoming China fully into the global economy would tame the “dragon.”
China would come to love the gains of capitalism, and its commercial attachments to Europe and the United States would cause the communist country to catch the bugs of democracy, pluralism, openness, and tolerance.
“By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom,” Clinton said in 2000. “When individuals have the power not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.”
And internationally, Clinton promised that China’s accession to the WTO would speed us toward “a world full of free markets, free elections, and free peoples working together.”
Henry Rowen, a senior intelligence official in President Ronald Reagan’s administration, said China was joining “the club of nations well along the road to democracy.”
The Wall Street Journal editorialized in the Bush era that “free trade is helping China emerge and integrate peacefully into an increasingly globalized, interdependent world.”
None of this happened, of course. Instead, we enriched China, which allowed it to build its state capacity, which it uses to harm its people and bully the rest of the world.
China puts Uyghurs in camps and tries to “deprogram” them out of their religious beliefs. It locked its people up in the cruelest COVID lockdowns while steadfastly refusing to deal with the world candidly about the nature or origin of the disease. Dissidents are imprisoned, and the internet is censored.
China aggressively expands into the South China Sea and Hong Kong. China aids Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. China steals our technology and spies on us.
Part of the deal for the past two-plus decades has been looking the other way from China’s human rights abuse. Then-Vice President Joe Biden went out of his way to say that the U.S. had no objection to the one-child policy, which controlled citizens’ family size through coercion, forced sterilization, and even forced abortion. China only abandoned this heinous policy in recent years when it realized depopulation was deadly, and now, there are reports that China is coercing women to have babies.
To recap: The U.S. debased ourselves, handed over our manufacturing, enriched an imperialist despot, and, in exchange, we got cheaper televisions and some rental pandas.
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Free trade among free countries enriches all parties. “Free trade” with communist despots was supposed to make the world a better place.
It didn’t. It was a bipartisan mistake, and it’s time both parties admit it.