FWD: Dangerous Liaisons...

As there were a few requests, I'm presuming it's alright to post this
longish item. (Forwarding does not necessarily connote agreement)

In any case, looks like PNTR has gone through Round 1, or is it final?

If so, SE Asia is going to have to scramble like mad to pull itself
up the ladder -- no one can compete against China at 'low-end'
manufacturing, and with India trying to get into the 'game' as well,
if it can sort itself out politically, it's going to be 'interesting'
times. Will China-India once again become the axis around which SE
Asia revolves? That would be quite a re-orientation, given that SE
Asia has grown these past thirty years on the basis of exports to the
USA-Japan.

The item can also be found on

http://www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/2000/5-china.html

Focus on the Global South's contact:

Focus on the Global South (FOCUS)
c/o CUSRI, Chulalongkorn University
Bangkok 10330 THAILAND
Tel: 662 218 7363/7364/7365
Fax: 662 255 9976
E-mail: admin@focusweb.org
Web Page   http://www.focusweb.org

It publishes an electronic bulletin, Focus on Trade.

kj khoo


---------------------------------------------------------
Dangerous Liaisons: Progressives, the Right, and the
Anti-China Trade Campaign

By Walden Bello and Anuradha Mittal*

Like the United States, China is a country that is full of
contradictions. It is certainly not a country that can be
summed up as "a rogue nation that decorates itself with
human rights abuses as if they were medals of honor."1 This
characterization by AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney joins
environmentalist Lester Brown's Cassandra-like warnings
about the Chinese people in hitting a new low in the
rhetoric of the Yellow Peril tradition in American populist
politics. Brown accuses the Chinese of being the biggest
threat to the world's food supply because they are climbing
up the food chain by becoming meat-eaters.2

These claims are disconcerting. At other times, we may
choose not to engage their proponents. But not today, when
they are being bandied about with studied irresponsibility
to reshape the future of relations between the world's most
populous nation and the world's most powerful one.

A coalition of forces seeks to deprive China of permanent
normal trading relations (PNTR) as a means of obstructing
that country's entry into the World Trade Organization
(WTO). We do not approve of the free-trade paradigm that
underpins NTR status. We do not support the WTO; we believe,
in fact, that it would be a mistake for China to join it.
But the real issue in the China debate is not the
desirability or undesirability of free trade and the WTO.
The real issue is whether the United States has the right to
serve as the gatekeeper to international organizations such
as the WTO. More broadly, it is whether the United States
government can arrogate to itself the right to determine who
is and who is not a legitimate member of the international
community. The issue is unilateralism--the destabilizing
thrust that is Washington's oldest approach to the rest of
the world.

The unilateralist anti-China trade campaign enmeshes many
progressive groups in the US in an unholy alliance with the
right wing that, among other things, advances the Pentagon's
grand strategy to contain China. It splits a progressive
movement that was in the process of coming together in its
most solid alliance in years. It is, to borrow Omar
Bradley's characterization of the Korean War, "the wrong war
at the wrong place at the wrong time."

The Real China

To justify US unilateralism vis-á-vis China, opponents of
NTR for China have constructed an image of China that could
easily have come out of the pen of Joseph McCarthy.

But what really is China? Since the anti-China lobby has
done such a good job telling us about China's bad side, it
might be appropriate to begin by showing the other side.

Many in the developing world admire China for being one of
the world's most dynamic economies, growing between 7-10 per
cent a year over the past decade. Its ability to push a
majority of the population living in abject poverty during
the Civil War period in the late forties into decent living
conditions in five decades is no mean achievement. That
economic dynamism cannot be separated from an event that
most countries in the global South missed out on: a social
revolution in the late forties and early fifties that
eliminated the worst inequalities in the distribution of
land and income and prepared the country for economic
takeoff when market reforms were introduced into the
agricultural sector in the late 1970's.

China likewise underlines a reality that many in the North,
who are used to living under powerful states that push the
rest of the world around, fail to appreciate: this is the
critical contribution of a liberation movement that
decisively wrests control of the national economy from
foreign interests. China is a strong state, born in
revolution and steeled in several decades of wars hot and
cold. Its history of state formation accounts for the
difference between China and other countries of the South,
like Thailand, Brazil, Nigeria, and South Korea. In this it
is similar to that other country forged in revolution,
Vietnam.

Foreign investors can force many other governments to dilute
their investment rules to accommodate them. That is
something they find difficult to do in China and Vietnam,
which are prepared to impose a thousand and one restrictions
to make sure that foreign capital indeed contributes to
development, from creating jobs to actually transferring
technology.

The Pentagon can get its way in the Philippines, Korea, and
even Japan. These are, in many ways, vassal states. In
contrast, it is very careful when it comes to dealing with
China and Vietnam, both of whom taught the US that bullying
doesn't pay during the Korean War and the Vietnam War,
respectively.

Respect is what China and Vietnam gets from transnationals
and Northern governments. Respect is what most of our
governments in the global South don't get. When it comes to
pursuing national interests, what separates China and
Vietnam from most of our countries are successful
revolutionary nationalist movements that got
institutionalized into no-nonsense states.

What is the "Case" against China?

Of course, China has problems when it comes to issues such
as its development model, the environment, workers rights,
human rights and democracy. But here the record is much more
complex than the picture painted by many US NGO's.

- The model of development of outward -oriented growth built
on exports to developed country markets of labor-intensive
products is no scheme to destroy organized labor thought up
by an evil regime. This is the model that has been
prescribed for over two decades by the World Bank and other
Western-dominated development institutions for the
developing countries. When China joined the World Bank in
the early eighties, this was the path to development
recommended by the officials and experts of that
institution.

Through the strategic manipulation of aid, loans, and the
granting of the stamp of approval for entry into world
capital markets, the Bank pushed export-oriented,
labor-intensive manufacturing and discouraged countries from
following domestic-market-oriented growth based on rising
wages and incomes. In this connection, it must be pointed
out that World Bank policies vis--vis China and the Third
World were simply extensions of policies in the US, Britain,
and other countries in the North, where the Keynesian or
Social Democratic path based on rising wages and incomes was
foreclosed by the anti-labor, pro-capitalist neoliberal
policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and their
ideological allies.

- True, development in China has been accompanied by much
environmental destruction and must be criticized. But what
many American environmentalists forget is that the model of
double-digit GDP growth based on resource-intensive,
waste-intensive, toxic-intensive production and unrestrained
levels of consumption is one that China and other developing
countries have been enouraged to copy from the North, where
it continues to be the dominant paradigm. Again, the World
Bank and the whole Western neoclassical economics
establishment, which has equated development with unchecked
levels of consumption, must bear a central part of the
blame.

Northern environmentalists love to portray China as
representing the biggest future threat to the global
environment. They assume that China will simply emulate the
unrestrained consumer-is-king model of the US and the North.
What they forget to mention is that per capita consumption
in China is currently just one tenth of that of developed
countries.3 What they decline to point out is that the US,
with five per cent of the world's population, is currently
the biggest single source of global climate change,
accounting as it does for a quarter of global greenhouse gas
emissions. As the Center for Science and Environment (CSE)
points out, the carbon emission level of one US citizen in
1996 was equal to that of 19 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 17
Maldivians, 49 Sri Lankans, 107 Bangladeshis, 134 Bhutanese,
or 269 Nepalis.4

When it comes to food consumption, Lester Brown's picture of
Chinese meat eaters and milk consumers destabilizing food
supply is simply ethnocentric, racist, and wrong. According
to FAO data, China's consumption of meat in 1992-94 was 33
kg per capita and this is expected to rise to 60 kg per
capita in 2020. In contrast, the comparable figures for
developed countries was 76 kg per capita in 1992-94, rising
to 83 kg in 2020. When it comes to milk, China's consumption
was 7 kg per capita in 1992-94, rising marginally to 12 kg
in 2020. Per capita consumption in developed countries, in
contrast was 195 kg and declining only marginally to 189 kg
in 2020.5

The message of these two sets of figures is unambiguous: the
unchecked consumption levels in the United States and other
Northern countries continue to be the main destabilizer of
the global environment.

- True, China is no workers' paradise. Yet it is simplistic
to say that workers have no rights, or that the government
has, in the manner of a pimp, delivered its workers to
transnationals to exploit. There are unions; indeed, China
has the biggest trade union confederation in the world, with
100 million members. Granted, this confederation is closely
linked with the government. But this is also the case in
Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and
many other countries. The Chinese trade unions are not
independent from government, but they ensure that workers'
demands and concerns are not ignored by government. If the
Chinese government were anti-worker, as AFL-CIO propaganda
would have it, it would have dramatically reduced its state
enterprise sector by now. It is precisely concern about the
future of the hundreds of millions of workers in state
enterprises that has made the government resist the
prescription to radically dismantle the state enterprise
sector coming from Chinese neoliberal economists, foreign
investors, the business press, and the US government--all of
whom are guided by a narrow efficiency/profitability
criterion, and are completely insensitive to the sensitivity
to employment issues of the government.

The fact is that workers in China probably have greater
protection and access to government than industrial workers
who live in right-to-work states (where non-union shops are
encouraged by law) in the United States. If there is a
government that must be targeted by the AFL-CIO for being
anti-labor, it must be its own government, which, in
collusion with business, has stripped labor of so many of
its traditional legal protections and rights that the
proportion of US workers unionized is down to only 13 per
cent of the work force!

- True, there is much to be done in terms of bringing
genuine democracy and greater respect for human rights in
China. And certainly, actions like the Tienanmen massacre
and the repression of political dissidents must be
condemned, in much the same way that Amnesty International
severely criticizes the United States for relying on mass
incarceration as a principal mechanism of social
control.6But this is not a repressive regime devoid of
legitimacy like the Burmese military junta.

As in the United States and other countries, there is a lot
of grumbling about government, but this cannot be said to
indicate lack of legitimacy on the part of the government.
Again and again, foreign observers in China note that while
there might be disaffection, there is widespread acceptance
of the legitimacy of the government.

Monopolization of decision making by the Communist Party at
the regional and national level is still the case, but
relatively free elections now take place in many of the
country's rural villages in an effort to deconcentrate power
from Beijing to better deal with rural economic problems,
according to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who
is otherwise quite critical of the Chinese leadership.7

Indeed, lack of Western-style multiparty systems and
periodic competitive elections does not mean that the
government is not responsive to people. The Communist Party
is all too aware of the fact that its continuing in power is
dependent on popular legitimacy. This legitimacy in turn
depends on convincing the masses that it is doing an
adequate job its fulfilling four goals: safeguarding
national sovereignty, avoiding political instability,
raising people's standard of living, and maintaining the
rough tradition of equality inherited from the period of
classical socialism. The drama of recent Chinese history has
been the way the party has tried to stay in power by
balancing these four concerns of the population. This
balancing act has been achieved, Asia expert Chalmers
Johnson writes, via an "ideological shift from an
all-embracing communism to an all-embracing nationalism
[that has] helped to hold Chinese society together, giving
it a certain intellectual and emotional energy and stability
under the intense pressures of economic transformation."8

- As for demand for democratic participation, this is
certainly growing and should be strongly supported by people
outside China. But it is wishful thinking to claim that
US-style forms of democratic expression have become the
overwhelming demand of the population. While one might not
agree with all the points he makes, a more accurate
portrayal of the state of things than that given by the
anti-China lobby is provided by the English political
philosopher John Gray in his classic work False Dawn:

China's current regime is undoubtedly transitional, but
rather than moving towards "democratic capitalism," it is
evolving from the western, Soviet institutions of the past
into a modern state more suited to Chinese traditions,
needs, and circumstances.

Liberal democracy is not on the historical agenda for China.
It is very doubtful if the one-child policy, which even at
present is often circumvented, could survive a transition to
liberal democracy. Yet, as China's present rulers rightly
believe, an effective population policy is indispensable if
scarcity of resources is not to lead to ecological
catastrophe and political crisis.

Popular memories of the collapse of the state and national
defenselessness between the world wars are such that any
experiment with political liberalization which appears to
carry the risk of near-anarchy of post-Soviet Russia will be
regarded with suspicion or horror by the majority of
Chinese. Few view the break-up of the state other than a
supreme evil. The present regime has a potent source of
popular legitimacy in the fact that so far it has staved off
that disaster.9

The Anti-China Trade Campaign: Wrong and Dangerous

It is against this complex backdrop of a country struggling
for development under a political system, which, while not
democratic along Western lines, is nevertheless legitimate,
and which realizes that its continuing legitimacy depends on
its ability to deliver economic growth that one must view
the recent debate in the US over the granting of Permanent
Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China.

PNTR is the standard tariff treatment that the United States
gives nearly all its trading partners, with the exception of
China, Afghanistan, Serbia-Montenegro, Cuba, Laos, North
Korea, and Vietnam. Granting of PNTR is seen as a key step
in China's full accession to the World Trade Organization
(WTO) since the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement establishing the
WTO requires members to extend NTR to other WTO members
mutually and without conditions. This is the reason that the
fight over PNTR is so significant, in that it is integrally
linked to China's full accession to the WTO.

Organized labor is at the center of a motley coalition that
is against granting PNTR to China. This coalition includes
right wing groups and personalities like Pat Buchanan, the
old anti-China lobby linked to the anti-communist Kuomintang
Party in Taiwan, protectionist US business groups, and some
environmentalist, human rights, and citizens' rights groups.
The intention of this right-left coalition is to be able to
use trade sanctions to influence China's economic and
political behavior as well as to make it difficult for China
to enter the WTO.

There are fundamental problems with the position of this
alliance, many of whose members are, without doubt, acting
out of the best intentions.

First of all, the anti-China trade campaign is essentially
another manifestation of American unilateralism. Like many
in the anti-PNTR coalition, we do not uphold the free-trade
paradigm that underpins the NTR. Like many of them, we do
not think that China will benefit from WTO membership. But
what is at issue here is not the desirability or
non-desirability of the free trade paradigm and the WTO in
advancing people's welfare. What is at issue here is
Washington's unilateral moves to determine who is to be a
legitimate member of the international economic
community--in this case, who is qualified to join and enjoy
full membership rights in the WTO.

This decision of whether or not China can join the WTO is
one that must be determined by China and the 137
member-countries of the WTO, without one power exercising
effective veto power over this process. To subject this
process to a special bilateral agreement with the United
States that is highly conditional on the acceding country's
future behavior falls smack into the tradition of
unilateralism.

One reason the anti-China trade campaign is particularly
disturbing is that it comes on the heels of a series of
recent unilateralist acts, the most prominent of which have
been Washington's cruise missile attacks on alleged
terrorist targets in the Sudan and Afghanistan in August
1998, its bombing of Iraq in December 1998, and the
US-instigated 12-week NATO bombardment of Kosovo in 1999. In
all three cases, the US refused to seek UN sanction or
approval but chose to act without international legal
restraints. Serving as the gatekeeper for China's
integration into the global economic community is the
economic correlate of Washington's military unilateralism.

Second, the anti-China trade campaign reeks of double
standards. A great number of countries would be deprived of
PNTR status were the same standards sought from China
applied to them, including Singapore (where government
controls the labor movement), Mexico (where labor is also
under the thumb of government), Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
states (where women are systematically relegated by law and
custom to second-class status as citizens), Pakistan (where
a military dictatorship reigns), Brunei (where democratic
rights are non-existent), to name just a few US allies. What
is the logic and moral basis for singling out China when
there are scores of other regimes that are, in fact, so much
more insensitive to the political, economic, and social
needs of their citizenries?

Third, the campaign is marked by what the great Senator J.
William Fulbright denounced as the dark side of the American
spirit that led to the Vietnam debacle--that is, "the
morality of absolute self-assurance fired by the crusading
spirit."10 It draws emotional energy not so much from
genuine concerns for human and democratic rights in China
but from the knee-jerk emotional ensemble of anti-communism
that continues to plague the US public despite the end of
the Cold War. When one progressive organizer says that
non-passage of the PNTR would inflict defeat on "the brutal,
arrogant, corrupt, autocratic, and oligarchic regime in
Beijing," the strong language is not unintentional: it is
meant to hit the old Cold War buttons to mobilize the old
anti-communist, conservative constituency, in the hope of
building a right-left populist base that could--somehow--be
directed at "progressive" ends.

Fourth, the anti-China trade campaign is intensely
hypocritical. As many critics of the campaign have pointed
out, the moral right of the US to deny permanent normal
trading rights to China on social and environmental grounds
is simply nonexistent given its record: the largest prison
population in the world, the most state-sponsored executions
of any country in the world, the highest income disparities
among industrialized countries, the world's biggest emitter
of greenhouse gases, and quasi-slavery conditions for farm
workers.11

Fifth, the anti-China trade campaign is intellectually
flawed. The issue of labor control in China lies at the core
of the campaign, which blames China's government for the low
wages that produce the very competitively priced goods that
are said to contribute to displacing US industries and
workers. This is plain wrong: the relatively low wages in
China stem less from wage repression than from the dynamics
of economic development. Widespread poverty or low economic
growth are the main reasons for the low wages in developing
countries. Were the state of unionism the central
determinant of wage levels, as the AFL-CIO claims, labor
costs in authoritarian China and democratic India, with its
formally free trade union movement, would not be equal, as
they, in fact, are.

Similarly, it is mainly the process of economic growth--the
dynamic interaction between the growing productivity of
labor, the reduction of the wage-depressing surplus of rural
labor, and rising profits--that triggers the rapid rise in
wage levels in an economy, as shown in the case of Taiwan,
Korea, and Singapore, which had no independent unions and
where strikes were illegal during their periods of rapid
development.12

Saying that the dynamics of development rather than the
state of labor organizing is by far the greatest determinant
of wage levels is not to say that the organization of labor
is inconsequential. Successful organizing has gotten workers
a higher level of wages than would be possible were it only
the dynamics of economic development that were at work. It
is not to argue that labor organizing is not desirable in
developing economies. Of course, it is not only desirable
but necessary, so that workers can keep more of the value of
production for themselves, reduce their exploitation by
transnational and state capitalist elites, and gain more
control over their conditions of work.

Sixth, the anti-China trade campaign is dishonest. It
invokes concern about the rights of Chinese workers and the
rights of the Chinese people, but its main objective is to
protect American jobs against cheap imports from China. This
is cloaking self-interest with altruistic rhetoric. What the
campaign should be doing is openly acknowledging that its
overriding goal is to protect jobs, which is a legitimate
concern and goal. And what it should be working for is not
invoking sanctions on human rights grounds, but working out
solutions such as managed trade, which would seek to balance
the need of American workers to protect their jobs while
allowing the market access that allows workers in other
countries to keep their jobs and their countries to sustain
a certain level of growth while they move to change their
development model.13

Instead, what the rhetoric of the anti-China trade campaign
does is to debase human rights and democratic rights
language with its hypocrisy while delegitimizing the
objective of protecting jobs--which is a central social and
economic right--by concealing it.

Seventh, the anti-China trade campaign is a classic case of
blaming the victim. China is not the enemy. Indeed, it is a
prisoner of a global system of rules and institutions that
allows transnational corporations to take advantage of the
differential wage levels of counties at different levels of
development to increase their profits, destabilize the
global environment by generalizing an export-oriented,
high-consumption model of development, and concentrate
global income in fewer and fewer hands.

Not granting China PNTR will not affect the functioning of
this global system. Not giving China normal trading and
investment rights will not harm transnational corporations;
they will simply take more seriously the option of moving to
Indonesia, Mauritius, or Mexico, where their ability to
exact concessions is greater than in China, which can stand
up to foreign interests far better than the weak governments
of these countries.

What the AFL-CIO and others should be doing is targeting
this global system, instead of serving up China as a proxy
for it.

A Positive Agenda

The anti-China trade campaign amounts to a Faustian bargain
that seeks to buy some space for US organized labor at the
expense of real solidarity with workers and progressive
worker and environmental movements globally against
transnational capital. But by buying into the traditional US
imperial response of unilateralism, it will end up
eventually eroding the position of progressive labor,
environmental, and civil society movements both in the US
and throughout the world.

What organized labor and US NGO's should be doing, instead,
is articulating a positive agenda aimed at weakening the
power of global corporations and multilateral agencies that
promote TNC-led globalization.

The first order of business is to not allow the progressive
movement to be sandbagged in the pro-permanent normal trade
relations, anti-permanent normal trade relations terms of
engagement that now frames the debate. While progressives
must, for the time being, oppose the more dangerous threat
posed by the unilateralists, they should be developing a
position on global economic relations that avoids both the
free trade paradigm that underlies the PNTR and the
unilateralist paradigm of the anti-PNTR forces. The model we
propose is managed trade, which allows trading partners to
negotiate bilateral and multilateral treaties that address
central issues in their relationship--among them, the need
to preserve workers jobs in the US with the developing
countries' need for market access.

Advocacy of managed trade must, however, be part of a
broader campaign for progressive global economic governance.
The strategic aim of such a campaign must be the tighter
regulation, if not replacement, of the model corporate-led
free market development that seeks to do away with social
and state restrictions on the mobility of capital at the
expense of labor. In its place must be established a system
of genuine international cooperation and looser global
economic integration that allows countries to follow paths
of national and regional development that make the domestic
market and regional markets rather than the global market
the engine of growth, development, and job creation.

This means support for measures of asset and income
redistribution that would create the purchasing power that
will make domestic markets viable. It means support for
trade measures and capital controls that will give countries
more control over their trade and finance so that commodity
and capital flows become less disruptive and destabilizing.
It means support for regional integration or regional
economic union among the developing countries as an
alternative to indiscriminate globalization.

A key element in this campaign for a new global economic
governance is the abolition of the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization that
serve as the pillars of the system of corporate-led
globalization and their replacement with a pluralistic
system of institutions that complement but at the same time
check and balance one another, thus giving the developing
countries the space to pursue their paths to development.

The IMF, World Bank, and WTO are currently experiencing a
severe crisis of legitimacy, following the debacle in
Seattle, the April protests in Washington, and the release
of the report of the International Financial Institutions
Advisory Commission (Meltzer Commission) appointed by the US
Congress, which recommends the radical downsizing or
transformation of the Bank and Fund.14 Now is the time for
the progressive movement to take the offensive and push for
the elimination or radical transformation of these
institutions. Yet, here we are, being waylaid from this
critical task at this key moment by an all-advised, divisive
campaign to isolate the wrong enemy!

Another key thrust of a positive agenda is a coordinated
drive by civil society groups in the North and the South to
pressure the US, China, and all other governments to ratify
and implement all conventions of the International Labor
Organization (ILO) and give the ILO more effective authority
to monitor, supervise, and adjudicate implementation of
these conventions. This campaign must be part of a broader
effort to support the formation of genuine labor unions in
China, the Southern United States, and elsewhere in a spirit
of real workers' solidarity. This, instead of relying on
government trade sanctions that are really self-serving
rather than meant to support Third World workers, is the
route to the creation of really firm ties of solidarity
across North-South lines.

This social and economic program must be tied to a strategy
for protecting the global environment that also eschews
sanctions as an approach and puts the emphasis on promoting
sustainable development models in place of the export-led,
high-consumption development model; pushes the adoption of
common environmental codes that prevent transnational firms
from pitting one country against another in their search for
the zero cost environmental regimes; and promotes an
environmental Marshall Plan aimed at transferring
appropriate green process and production technologies to
China and other developing countries.

Above all, this approach must focus not on attacking China
and the South but on strategically changing the production
and consumption behavior and levels in the North that are by
far the biggest source of environmental destabilization.

Finally, a positive agenda must have as a central element
civil society groups in the North working constructively
with people's movements in China, the United States, and
other countries experiencing democratic deficits to support
the expansion of democratic space. While the campaign must
be uncompromising in denouncing acts of repression like the
Tienanmen Square massacre and Washington's use of mass
incarceration as a tool of social control, it must avoid
imposing the forms of Western procedural democracy on others
and hew to the principle that it is the people in these
countries themselves that must take the lead in building
democracy according to their rhythm, traditions, and
cultures.

Abandoning Unilateralism

The anti-PNTR coalition is an alliance born of opportunism.
In its effort to block imports from China, the AFL-CIO is
courting the more conservative sectors of the US population,
including the Buchananite right wing, by stirring the old
Cold War rhetoric. Nothing could be a more repellent image
of this sordid project than John Sweeney, James Hoffa,
President of the Teamsters, and Pat Buchanan holding hands
in the anti-China trade rally on April 12, 2000, with
Buchanan promising to make Hoffa his top negotiator of
trade, if he won the race for president.

Some environmental groups and citizens groups which have
long but unsuccessfully courted labor, have, in turn,
endorsed the campaign because they see it as the perfect
opportunity to build bridges to the AFL-CIO. What we have,
as a result, is an alliance built on the assertion of US
unilateralism rather than on the cornerstone of fundamental
shared goals of solidarity, equity, and environmental
integrity.

This is not a progressive alliance but a right-wing populist
alliance in the tradition of the anti-communist Big
Government-Big Capital-Big Labor alliance during the Cold
War, the labor-capital alliance in the West that produced
the Exclusion and Ant-Miscegenation Acts against Chinese,
Japanese, and Filipino workers in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, and, more recently, the populist movement
that has supported the tightening of racist immigration laws
by emphasizing the divide between workers who are citizens
and workers who are not, with the latter being deprived of
basic political rights.

It is a policy that will, moreover, feed global instability
by lending support to the efforts of the US right and the
Pentagon to demonize China as The Enemy and resurrect
Containment as America's Grand Strategy, this time with
China instead of the Soviet Union as the foe in a paradigm
designed to advance American strategic hegemony.

As in every other instance of unprincipled unity between the
right and some sectors of the progressive movement,
progressives will find that it will be the right that will
walk away with the movement while they will be left with not
even their principles.

It is time to move away from this terribly misguided effort
to derail the progressive movement by demonizing China, and
to bring us all back to the spirit of Seattle as a movement
of citizens of the world against corporate-led globalization
and for genuine international cooperation.

*Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global
South, a program of research, analysis, and capacity
building based in Bangkok; Anuradha Mittal is co-director of
the Oakland-based Institute for Food and Development Policy,
better known as Food First. We would like to thank Nicola
Bullard, Peter Rosset, and Sal Glynn for their invaluable
advice and assistance.


Footnotes:

1. Quoted in John Gershman, "How to Debate the China Issue
without China Bashing," Progressive Response, Vol. 4, No.
17, April 20, 2000.
2. Lester Brown, Who Will Feed China? (New York: Norton,
1995).
3. Anil Agarwal, Sunita Narain, and Anju Sharma, eds., Green
Politics (New Delhi: Center for Science and Environment,
2000), p. 108.
4. Ibid., p. 16.
5. FAO and IMPACT data cited in Simeon Ehui, "Trade and Food
Systems in the Developing World," Presentation at Salzburg
Seminar, Salzburg, Austria, May 11, 2000.
6. Amnesty International, Unted States of America: Rights
for All (London: amnesty International Publications, 1998).
7. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York:
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1999), p. 50.
8. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of
American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 50.
9. John Gray, False Dawn (New York: New Press, 1998), pp.
189-190.
10. J. William Fulbright, quoted in Walter McDougall,
Promised Land, Crusader State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1997), p. 206.
11. See Anuradha Mittal and Peter Rosset, "The Real Enemy is
the WTO, not China," Peaceworks, March 1, 2000; and Jim
Smith, "The China Syndrome--or, How to Hijack a Movement,"
LA Labor News, Aprl 2, 2000.
12. For the state of the labor movement in these societies
in the period of rapid growth, see Walden Bello and
Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle
Economies in Crisis (San Francisco: Institute
for Food and Development Policy, 1990).
13. For more on managed trade, see, among others, Johnson,
p. 174.
14. Report of the US Congressional International Financial
Institution Advisory Commission (Washington: DC, US
Congress, Feb. 2000).