After thirteen years, the U.S. has secured China's agreement to a massive list of trade and investment concessions that few dreamed possible only months ago. As China enters WTO, it will reduce tariff and non-tariff barriers to American products, services, and commercial activities as never before, thanks to U.S. tenacity at the bargaining table. This spells economic opportunity for American farmers, workers, exporters, services firms and consumers.

2. THE NAME FITS: NTR MEANS NORMAL TRADE RELATIONS, NOT PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT. Today, the U.S. extends standard NTR to every nation in the globe but six: Afghanistan, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Serbia-Montenegro and Vietnam. Even embargoed countries like Iraq and Libya technically receive NTR trade status from the United States. More than 100 nations receive preferential U.S. tariff treatment more favorable than NTR.

Those who focus most heavily on the U.S. trade deficit with China should be among PNTR's strongest supporters. Our WTO market-access agreement with China opens markets that China has persistently denied to us in the past. This is spectacularly true, both in agriculture and in the service sector -- distribution, telecoms, financial services, auto finance, to name a few examples -- which are critical to America's success in global markets. But China's critical market openings won't apply to the U.S. without PNTR.

American firms bring to China ideas, work styles, management methods, adherence to market economics, commitment to the free flow of information, dedication to environmental responsibility and worker safety, and other American attributes that remain embryonic in China. American business's influence in China’s transformation is modest, but real. That influence will grow as the American business sector expands its operations in China under PNTR. But it will falter if PNTR fails and American opportunities are ceded to our global competitors, whose norms often differ markedly from our own.

5. WTO RULES ARE THE WORLD'S BULWARK AGAINST THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE IN INTERNATIONAL TRADE. U.S. ECONOMIC SECURITY REQUIRES THAT A GROWING CHINA BE HELD TO WTO OBLIGATIONS.

WTO codes are the world's common defense against any member's destructive go-it-alone behavior. The US is the leading architect of those codes, in its own interest. Only by providing Full WTO Member Treatment for China (PNTR) will the U.S. be able to call on the full weight of the international trading system in pursuit of legitimate grievances against Chinese abuse of the WTO rules of the road. Americans will not enjoy the protection of WTO enforcement unless we treat China as a WTO member by establishing PNTR.

6. TURNING DOWN PNTR AMOUNTS TO UNILATERAL ECONOMIC DISARMAMENT,

Saying "No" to PNTR means handing our opportunities to our global competitors, while we spurn the gains we've achieved at the negotiating table. In WTO, one NTR fits all: members can't discriminate against individual countries. We grant PNTR to every other WTO member; anything short of that is WTO-incompatible. If the U.S. rejects for China the PNTR it offers all others in WTO, China would deny to the U.S. the critical reforms of its trade and investment conduct (many secured by U.S. negotiators) that it will automatically provide to all 133 other WTO members.

Congress's decision is simply whether Americans will enjoy the same improvements in China's economic and trade environment that China will provide to all 133 other WTO members. When China completes its bilateral negotiations with remaining negotiating partners, as it did last November 15 with the US (its toughest negotiating adversary), the WTO's members will welcome China to the WTO. Congress must decide whether or not the U.S. will treat the PRC as a full WTO member when, not if, the PRC joins the WTO.

China, not the U.S., has made all the commitments to lower tariffs, market-opening, and administrative reform as it prepares for WTO accession; China, as the nation seeking to enter the WTO, has signed off on the tough list of commitments the U.S. has demanded as conditions of American support for China's WTO candidacy. The idea that the U.S. has somehow "given in" to China is 180 degrees off the mark.

On this question, Americans interested in positive change within China should be in the locomotive, not the caboose! China under WTO disciplines must reform many domestic commercial, legal, and administrative practices offensive to many Americans. Many in organized labor and in Congress, for example, have complained about Chinese requirements that U.S. firms transfer technology as the price for investment opportunity in China. That, and many other unacceptable practices, are set to be eliminated upon Chinese WTO accession -- for all other WTO members, and for us -- if we establish PNTR. U.S. rejection of PNTR, after China's leadership has made the wrenching commitments to reform its domestic policies at U.S. demand, would only lend strength to the very forces within China that the Congress finds most objectionable.

It will not do to say, "Let the Europeans and the Japanese get the concessions by granting China PNTR; we'll get them on the cheap." The WTO requires all its members to treat each other without discrimination, and to provide NTR without condition. If the U.S. establishes NTR for China in a manner different from the way it treats the other 133 members, that's discrimination. If the U.S. perpetuates China NTR on a basis that renders it liable to revocation each year -- even if the current legal language regarding freedom of emigration were removed -- that would be conditional, since it would require that no issues would ever arise that would cause Congress to revoke it. Either way, anything short of PNTR would not be full WTO member treatment, and China would not extend full WTO member treatment to the U.S. End of argument: we don't give it, we don't get it.

02/07/2000