1. Congress's vote on PNTR is not a vote on whether China becomes a member of the World Trade Organization or not. The 133 member countries and territories of the WTO decide that. Having concluded the impressive US-China agreement of last November, the United States will support China's access when China finishes its remaining bilateral WTO deals and the WTO accession process kicks in. Since the vote is not on whether we "permit" China to enter the WTO or not, the vote is not a "gift to China."

2. Establishing a different NTR for China than we provide to all other WTO members is discriminatory. WTO members may not discriminate in their treatment of one another. The United States treasures that core WTO requirement, because it prevents other countries from discriminating against our goods, services, and investments. But if we discriminate against another WTO member, that member is entitled to discriminate against us. All members of the WTO extend permanent unconditional NTR to all other members, and receive that treatment in return. US treatment of China in a different manner from the treatment of other WTO members will punish our workers, our producers, our farmers, our exporters, and even our consumers.

3. Failure to provide PNTR--full WTO member treatment--to China as it enters the WTO is unilateral American economic disarmament in favor of our global competitors. If the United States discriminates against China by establishing a different, non-permanent form of NTR for this one country, the US forfeits its right to avail itself of the massive economic and commercial concessions that China has agreed to--in our negotiation with the PRC--as conditions of China's entry into the WTO. China's commitments to open its markets, end discrimination against foreign goods and businesses, open hitherto closed sectors to international participation, and so on--plus its obligation to submit to WTO disciplines and binding WTO dispute resolution--will be available to every WTO member except the United States if we walk away from our one obligation--to treat China like a WTO member when China enters the WTO.

4. The claim that we can deny PNTR to China and still enjoy all the economic and commercial advantages that the other 133 WTO members will enjoy when China joins, thanks to our 1979 trade agreement with China that calls for reciprocal MFN, is false. The 1979 US-China trade agreement, signed at the moment diplomatic relations began and before there was a significant US-China trade or investment relationship, is a couple of pages long. Its MFN provision deals only with reciprocal exchange of lowest standard tariffs, on goods. In China's upcoming WTO accession, lower tariffs are only one of many factors: the great bulk of the benefits China has agreed to provide to the world as it enters WTO are non-tariff related, and none of those, including WTO dispute-resolution processes, is available to the United States through the 1979 three-pager. By this point in this debate, it is simply inconceivable that those who continue to peddle this "We get it all anyway" line don't know better.

That line is also demeaning to the United States: "Let the Europeans and the Asians level the playing field for all of us by establishing PNTR with China themselves; we'll get the goods through the back door." Wrong on the merits, and wrong on what it implies about the United States in world affairs. Even if the statement were true, which it isn't, the United States should lead, not hide in the pleats of somebody else's skirts on issues involving global economic stability.

5. China's WTO accession does not spell automatic loss of US jobs, as PNTR's opponents say it does, any more than it automatically spells a gigantic expansion of US employment. Evocations of the "Great Sucking Sound" debate over NAFTA a few years ago will not wash. Leave aside the fact that China's WTO accession involves no US economic concessions at all, and leave aside the fact that NAFTA has bolstered employment in some US sectors. Even five minutes' consideration will tell the youngest novice that the situation with China is not as simple as the "Sucking Sound" forces continue to suggest. Consider:

• Massive lowering of Chinese tariffs is likely to diminish the pressure to invest in-country that some foreign companies now face, simply to get their products into the Chinese market. If your product is no longer hit with tariffs that price you out of China's market, you may decide to ship into China from the United States, or from another production facility already operating somewhere else.
• The percentage of total production costs accounted for by labor varies from product to product. Most US investment abroad is rooted in calculations other than labor cost. If companies really consider low labor costs to be the sole factor in their decisions, they will move to many countries before they go to China. In fact, for the most part, US exports to the world do not consist of labor-intensive products, but rather of products of US technological strength, design and marketing skill, and production efficiency.
• Yes, China's investment climate for foreign firms is going to improve with WTO entry. For example, at US insistence, China has agreed to prohibit existing practices that require foreign firms to transfer advanced production technology or export a portion of their PRC-produced goods simply in order to be allowed to operate in China at all. But these very concessions that China has now made were until recently the cherished aims of the same US political forces that now insist on denying them to our own people. Would they rather, as will be the case if PNTR is not approved, that US firms continue to be forced to transfer technology and export their products from China? What does that do for US employment?
• As one astute Congressman noted in a PNTR hearing in mid-February, every trade agreement, like every technological innovation or product invention or change in market conditions, brings gains and losses. This is the real truth, but perhaps because it's a balanced view it gets short shrift in the assault on PNTR. No attempt to assess the implications of China's presence in the WTO should count the presumed negatives without taking account of the presumed positives stemming from enormous expansion of US market access in China.

6. The PNTR vote is simply not about US approval or disapproval of elements of China's internal behavior that some Americans find repellent. Saying that it is doesn't make it so. This notion that enacting a US policy to reap the benefits of a splendid trade agreement is somehow the same as stamping the seal of approval on objectionable political or government practices in China is just hopelessly wrongheaded. It is hard, sometimes, to believe that those making this case really fail to understand that PNTR is not a gift to China--it's a reward to the United States.

This argument seems to be particularly seductive in Congress, whose members must meet the aroused concerns of voters on a thousand issues and who are presumed to be able to do something about each of them. The fact is that neither China's WTO admission, in which Congress has no say, nor the establishment of full WTO-member trade relations between the US and China, in which Congress has the say, is likely to make a direct and short-term difference to the long menu of "hot button" US-China issues. Again, those who continue to argue that PNTR is some sort of US "approval" of injustice--and that denial of PNTR would be a fruitful way for the US to combat evil--ought to know better and, in my experience, in most cases usually do know better.

The meaning for China

On the other hand, let's look ahead a little, beyond this spring, beyond this November. The long-term implications for positive social and institutional change in China embedded in China's WTO agreement with the US are incalculably great, and have been ignored by both sides in the American debate--a debate which, as usual, paints China in fantasies of black and white.

Simply put, what China has agreed to at our insistence is the greatest single step in the direction of a market economy--with all the institutional reforms that this will demand--in the history of the People's Republic of China. Listen to the words of Pieter Bottelier, who, as the World Bank's Chief of Mission in China through much of the 1990s, came face to face every day with the immensity of China's challenges in shedding the burden of Soviet-style economics and reaching toward the market economy:

The bilateral US-China WTO accession agreement of November 1999 is a historic breakthrough in China's economic modernization drive. It marks the first time since the start of market reforms under Deng Xiaoping in 1978 (and probably the first time in Chinese history) that a comprehensive set of domestic reform targets became the subject of a formal international agreement with, when WTO membership kicks in, powerful multilateral legal sanction.

The Americans who are the most dissatisfied with aspects of China's internal situation should be the most vigorous of all of us in insisting on full US involvement in the WTO-assisted evolution of China's economic and social systems.

The current debate in perspective

A century ago, the United States Congress was knee-deep in high-intensity debate over China. The issue then was closing American borders to immigrants from China, a policy first enacted into law in the Geary Act of 1892 and impelled both by demands from labor organizations and by widespread hostility in American life toward the Chinese and their alien ways.

The leader of the American Federation of Labor published a pamphlet on the subject in 1902: "Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion, Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?" The US Commissioner-General of Immigration and former head of the Knights of Labor, Terence Powderly, said in 1901, "No graver danger has ever menaced the workingmen of America than that which faces them when the possibility of lowering the bars at our seaports and border-lines to the Chinese is presented." Senator Teller of Colorado weighed in: "If I knew the passage of a proper exclusion bill would destroy every dollar's worth of trade between us and China, I should vote for the exclusion bill. I know that the trade between here and China is not worth the admission of Chinese hordes into this country, and if I had to choose between the two I should take the exclusion."

The PNTR Debate of the year 2000 is not about "Oriental exclusion," as the Americans of 100 years ago called it. But it is nonetheless eerily similar in the degree of emotionalism, the intensity of the antagonism, and the complexity of the multiple domestic agendas again surrounding a China policy issue within our country. Our ambivalence toward China is unchanging, reflected again in the booming assaults now under way against the humble decision facing the Congress: to continue without threat of revocation a standard, non-discriminatory tariff regime for Chinese products entering the United States.

On the merits, PNTR brings equality of commercial and economic opportunity to the United States; without it we forego those chances. Both sides in this debate know that. This simple truth, and the facts discussed above, will ultimately prevail over the carefully crafted misstatements and diversions of PNTR's well-armed opponents. But it is clear from the escalating conflict over PNTR that now confronts us that this truth and these facts cannot be restated often enough.