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Shortly after the House Republican leadership secured passage, 237 to 197, of President Clinton’s proposal to grant Permanent Normal Trade Relations status to communist China and to endorse Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization, North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms swept aside the almost universal prediction that passage of the proposal was a done deal in the Senate and instead vowed to fight Clinton’s policy every step of the way.
“Before the communist leaders in Beijing, and their allies in the White House, start popping the champagne corks,” said Helms, “they must be reminded: The debate now comes to the Senate.”
“We are going to have a debate, Mr. Clinton,” Helms vowed. “And we are going to have votes — perhaps uncomfortable votes — on a range of issues relating to China. In the end, China’s tyrants may — or may not — get the package Mr. Clinton has prepared for them. But they should be under no illusions that the U.S. Senate will in any way, shape or form endorse the brutal Chinese regime, or that the Senate will somehow permanently insulate the communist leaders of China from the consequences of their brutal behavior toward their own people.”
Stifling debate
“We will discuss China’s horrendous labor practices, including the use of prison slave labor,” said Helms, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. “We will discuss China’s brutal suppression of religious freedom. We will discuss China’s ongoing crackdown on peaceful political dissent. We will discuss China’s proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to rogue nations.
“And one more thing. The Senate is going to discuss China’s escalating threats to invade democratic Taiwan and the threats from Beijing to use nuclear weapons against American cities if the U.S. dares to defend our allies in Taipei.”
In the House of Representatives, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier, R-Calif., worked hand-in-glove with the Republican leadership and with the Clinton administration to strip the China bill of almost every provision that would have embarrassed the bill’s supporters in floor debate. The only minor concession Rules made was to include a
provision sponsored by Rep. Chris Cox, R.-Calif., that would at least
guarantee annual congressional discussion of China’s performance in the
field of human rights.
Senate rules, however, do not give the leadership arbitrary power to stifle debate, and Helms, one of the greatest masters of the rules in Senate history, cannot be stopped from forcing votes on virtually any issue related to U.S.-China relations.
Nonetheless, if the bill passes, as most now predict, China will have been granted two major benefits by an alliance of congressional Republicans with the Clinton White House:
- There will no longer be an annual review — and congressional vote — on whether China’s communist regime merits what is now called Normal Trade Relations status (formerly known as Most Favored Nation status) with the United States. With Permanent Normal Trade Relations status, the People’s Republic of China will be guaranteed the same access to the American market as democratic-capitalist regimes such as Great Britain and Germany — no matter how the PRC behaves in other areas.
- China also will become, with U.S. backing, a member of the World Trade Organization, where it will have the same vote as the United States, and where it will have a right to challenge the validity of U.S. laws in secret international tribunals where foreign trade lawyers serve as judges.
This second benefit will also be a boon to major multinational corporations that have formed partnerships with China’s communist regime. WTO membership, for example, will allow joint-venture manufacturing facilities operated by the Chinese regime and U.S. defense contractors, such as Boeing and Motorola, to sue the United States in WTO tribunals to overturn laws passed by Congress that Motorola, Boeing and the Chinese communists oppose.
Testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee in 1994, when the Clinton administration first proposed the WTO charter to Congress for approval, then-House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., who favored the charter, candidly conceded it would transfer some American sovereignty to an international organization.
Said Gingrich: “I am just saying that we need to be honest about the fact that we are transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization. This is a transformational moment. I would feel better if the people who favor this would just be honest about the scale of the change.”
By endorsing communist Chinese membership in the WTO, Congress is endorsing not only giving a totalitarian regime an equal vote to that of the United States in an organization of global government, but it is also giving that regime the authority to challenge the legitimacy of laws duly passed under the U.S. Constitution.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the Constitution gave Congress the power to “regulate trade with foreign nations.” The WTO Charter — which requires all WTO members to conform to the organization’s rulings — transfers that power to WTO tribunals. Granting China membership in the WTO gives a communist regime a part of the sovereign power over U.S. trade policy that the Founding Fathers reserved for Congress alone.
Advocates of Permanent Normal Trade Relations and WTO membership for China — many of them conservatives — argue that increased exposure to Western business interests and commodities will transform China from a totalitarian regime to a free one. Only time will tell if that is a correct assessment.
But the principal lobbyists behind this bill do not hail from civil libertarian and human rights organizations. Nor do they come from small or family-owned businesses.
The Business Roundtable targeted 88 congressional districts and put 60 lobbyists on the issue full time.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
targeted 66 districts and spent $4 million.
Meanwhile, Chinese
former political prisoners Harry Wu and Wei
Jingsheng traveled from office to office on Capitol Hill personal witness to the fact that 11 years of Most Favored Nation treatment since the Tianenman Square massacre have not made China more free.
From a national security perspective, a Senate victory for Chinese WTO membership could be seen as a fitting bookend to a second Clinton term that began with illegal campaign contributions flowing from the Chinese military into the coffers of the President’s reelection campaign.
China apparently will pay no penalty at all for trying to fix an American presidential election.
During the Clinton administration — and without suffering any sanction from the administration, or from the Justice Department, or from a Congress held by the opposition party — China helped fund the election of President Clinton, stole U.S. nuclear secrets, bought U.S. supercomputers to use in applying those secrets to the actual production of weapons, secured U.S. rocket technology from U.S. defense contractors, threatened the nuclear vaporization of American cities, and, for good measure, purchased the ports at the entrances to the Panama Canal.
And, as it did all this, the Chinese regime intensified oppression of its own people, throwing hundreds of thousands of political and religious dissidents into prison without trial and
forcing them to work to
produce goods for export.
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