COMMENTARY
U.S. protectionists cooking up new China scare
By Tom Plate
America's love-hate relationship with China proceeds apace. The latest bump in the bilateral road is yet another fearsome China scare.
Associated Press
Actually, though, in America, this is nothing new. The U.S. political psyche seems to need a good China scare from time to time to get the juices flowing.
Chinese leader Jiang Zemin signed a trade agreement on March 1 in Vietnam. China's economic strength will be a plus, the writer argues.
Recall that an almost perfect storm swirled around the 1997 book "The Coming Conflict With China." Whipped up by two American journalists formerly stationed in Beijing, the polemic, as the title suggests, was anything but optimistic about the Sino-U.S. relationship, bulking up China's military buildup and melodramatizing the truth that China's strategic aims in Asia do not (of course) perfectly mirror those of the United States.
Two years later, a different scare came from the Cox Commission report, alleging widespread Chinese spying in America. But that fizzled after U.S. media exhausted themselves in their hysteria — and when Washington's case against nuclear scientist and alleged spy Wen Ho Lee fell apart. And after a federal judge not only invalidated all but a single charge but also blasted the government for even filing the case, suddenly it seemed as if all those Chinese spies had simply gone home.
This time, the scare issue is China's economic development, which now, it seems, is a major economic menace. Instead of being, on balance, an overall blessing for all concerned, China's rapid growth is being pitched as a rapacious force undermining other Asian economies and eating away at America's, as well.
The pitchmen come from within U.S. lobbies fearful of competing with lower-priced Chinese imports that American consumers (not all of them communists!) increasingly see as good buys.
President Bush "continues to facilitate the transfer of money, industrial capacity and technology to China in ways that will aid its development as a threat to the United States and its Asian allies," charges William R. Hawkins, a protectionist pundit for the U.S. Business and Industry Council, adding: "The Bush administration must choose between the need to protect American security from a rising China and its desire to please corporate supporters who are helping China rise."
Then there's the dogmatic argument that China's gain is basically everyone else's loss. An increasingly globalized and modernized nation of 1.3 billion is not a win-win for almost everyone; it is, according to this argument, a losing proposition for everyone but China. That's absurd. Sure, China's neighbors in Asia — from Indonesia and Taiwan to Singapore and Japan — are understandably worried about Chinese competition. They know they are going to have to work harder and compete smarter.
Indeed, one Tokyo-based pundit — Japanese management guru and author ("'The Borderless World") Kenichi Ohmae — writes in a coming issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, an influential West Coast journal, that Chinese competition could cause more problems for neighboring countries than the Asian economic crisis of 1997-99.
That's highly doubtful. Indeed, any doomsday scenario of greatly reduced growth, devastated domestic stock markets and destabilizing levels of unemployment is unnecessary fear-mongering.
Certainly, China's economic progress will produce some tense moments, just as the Japanese economic surge of the 1980s roiled economies in America and Europe. But on the whole, Asia and the rest of the world was far more enriched by Japan's success than undermined, and that will be the case, too, as China rises economically.
And surely, China's entry into the World Trade Organization and its acceptance of globalization will not be smooth as silk when China's own protectionist lobbies kick in to slow down market openings and frustrate Premier Zhu Rongji's reform program. For all countries have domestic lobbies trying to bar foreign economic competition.
Just look at the extraordinary worldwide row over the Bush administration's decision to cave in to the U.S. steel industry by slapping regressive import quotas on foreign steel.
That decision has our strategic and economic allies in Asia (such as South Korea) and in Europe (such as Britain) angrier at the United States than at anything China has done lately. And Los Angeles Times reporters Carol Williams and Marjorie Miller wrote last week from Moscow that Russia, where steel sales to America count for a tenth of its total bilateral trade, is so furious that it just might pull out of the anti-terrorism campaign, not to mention trade agreements with the United States.
Who is the greater threat to world economic equanimity — China or the United States? There's no way to answer that, of course, and it's really a silly question. Even so, let's not put that proposition to a vote in London, Moscow or Seoul just now. Let's just say that what's continually needed in America's relationship with China is not another Red scare, but the three ingredients all too often missing: common sense, political maturity and intellectual honesty.
Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. He also has a spot on the Web.
