Читать книгу Getting China Wrong - Aaron L. Friedberg - Страница 15

As they entered the last decade of the twentieth century, American policy-makers believed that powerful historical tides were bearing their country, and the world, towards the safe harbor that their predecessors had long envisioned, but had never been able to reach. A truly global liberal democratic order was finally in sight. Some navigational adjustments would be required at times, to be sure, but the direction seemed set and the destination assured. A final factor that added ballast to this enterprise, helping to keep the ship of state on course, was the growing weight of commercial interests.

Unlike other participants in the network of multilateral trade agreements signed during the Cold War, China was not yet a full member in good standing of the US-led global trading system. The MFN status that it had been granted in 1980 meant that its exports were subject to the same low tariffs as those from most other US trading partners. But, in contrast to these countries, under the terms of the 1974 Jackson–Vanik amendment, China’s privileges, like those of the Soviet Union and other Communist bloc countries, were subject to annual review and could be revoked if a president judged that the CCP regime was abusing the rights of its citizens.

Routine renewal of MFN status during the 1980s enabled increasing trade flows between the two countries.⁵² Slowly at first, American companies also began to invest directly in China, often establishing joint ventures in which they provided the money and know-how, while a local partner supplied cheap labor and helped navigate a dense thicket of rules and regulations.⁵³ Despite the growing appeal of such arrangements, the enthusiasm of American business executives was constrained by their awareness of lingering political risk. If for some reason relations soured and Beijing lost its favored status, Chinese exports, including those made in American-owned factories, would suddenly face prohibitively high tariffs. Once-profitable investments could then become costly liabilities almost overnight.

The Tiananmen Square massacre and its aftermath brought these fears to the fore. But they also served to mobilize and solidify a powerful coalition of business groups that successfully fended off immediate threats to their interests and, in the process, helped to transform economic engagement into the central pillar of post-Cold War US China strategy. In response to the bloodshed in Beijing, the George H.W. Bush administration imposed limited sanctions and suspended the sale of arms and some sensitive dual-use technologies, but it resisted Congressional pressure either to revoke China’s MFN status or to impose conditions for its renewal.⁵⁴ Having criticized his predecessor for being soft on “the butchers of Beijing,” in May 1993 newly elected President Bill Clinton decided to take a different tack, renewing China’s status but issuing an executive order demanding that it make “significant progress” on human rights if it wished to retain its trade privileges. One year later, however, despite Beijing’s rejection of his demands, Clinton reversed course and restored China’s status without condition or the threat of further review.

The most important cause of this consequential decision was the unprecedentedly intense and well-organized pressure brought to bear on Congress and the White House by substantial swaths of the American business community. Three aspects of this campaign deserve special note. First and perhaps most obvious is its sheer breadth and diversity. By one count, by the spring of 1994, “nearly 800 major companies and trade associations” were involved in what was described at the time as one of the “largest lobbying efforts ever” mounted by American business.⁵⁵ Among those taking part were corporate giants from across a range of sectors, including aerospace (Boeing, Hughes, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas), the automotive industry (Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors), energy (Exxon), electrical machinery (Westinghouse and General Electric), electronics (Motorola and Intel), and food processing (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and McDonald’s).⁵⁶ These firms were joined by major lobbying groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, as well as associations representing smaller industries and enterprises, including everything from wheat farmers and footwear retailers to the manufacturers of fertilizer. The views of the financial industry also received a sympathetic hearing inside the Clinton administration, thanks in part to the creation in 1993 of a new National Economic Council headed by former Goldman Sachs executive Robert Rubin.⁵⁷

A second notable aspect of the effort to protect China’s MFN status was its forward-looking, speculative quality. For many of those involved, support for delinking MFN status from human rights was driven less by the reality of present earnings than by the alluring promise of future profits. China was important and getting more so, but it was nowhere near the goldmine that many hoped it would someday become. Despite an upward trend during the 1980s, on the eve of Tiananmen the value of the United States’ exports to China still accounted for just 1.6% of its total exports.⁵⁸ Meanwhile, by this point, the number of investment projects funded directly by US companies was only in the hundreds, accounting for just under 1% of total US foreign direct investment.⁵⁹

While some of the industries and individual companies involved in pressuring the Clinton administration were already doing substantial business with (or in) China, many were not. The varying experiences of several large and influential corporations illustrate the point. According to a survey of references in the press and the Congressional record, Boeing, AT&T, and General Motors were the three most vocal and visible players in the MFN campaign.⁶⁰ Of these, by the early 1990s, Boeing had already sold 200 commercial aircraft to China’s still-antiquated airlines, amounting to fully one-sixth of its total overseas sales, with many more potential purchases in sight.⁶¹ Meanwhile, despite having made the decision that China would be a critical “strategic manufacturing location,” and a “key country” in its “globalization effort,” AT&T’s self-confessed “stumbles and missed opportunities” had left it with only a handful of small joint ventures dedicated to the manufacture of some pieces of network-switching equipment.⁶² For its part, General Motors was eager to get into what promised to be both a booming market for car sales and a promising site for the manufacture of low-cost auto parts, but, with the exception of a recently signed joint venture agreement to build trucks, it had been absent from China since the Communists took power in 1949.⁶³

While Tiananmen cast a temporary pall, subsequent events sharpened the appetites and restored the animal spirits of American business. After a period of disruption and retrenchment, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping relaunched his program of “reform and opening up” with a highly publicized 1992 tour of the country’s fast-developing southern provinces. A burst of renewed growth and an influx of foreign investment quickly followed. Between 1991 and 1993, China’s economy expanded by 60%.⁶⁴ By 1993, its annual growth rate had risen to the astonishing figure of over 13%,⁶⁵ making it the fastest-growing economy on the planet and, according to a study released by the International Monetary Fund, the world’s third largest, having surpassed Germany and closing in rapidly on Japan.⁶⁶ During this same period, foreign direct investment grew by 450%,⁶⁷ with Chinese companies signing over 83,000 contracts with foreign investors in 1993 alone.⁶⁸ Some of this money came from American corporations, but the even greater sums flowing in from Japan, Germany, and other sources meant that the US share of total foreign direct investment in China was starting to undergo a marked decline.⁶⁹ If the Clinton administration suspended China’s MFN status, or even if it continued to threaten to do so, American companies feared that they would lose out on unprecedented opportunities, even if, in many cases, they had not yet begun fully to enjoy them. A letter to the president from a newly formed coalition of trade associations put the matter concisely: “The persistent threat of MFN withdrawal does little more than create an unstable and excessively risky environment for US companies considering trade and investment in China, and leaves China’s booming economy to our competitors.”⁷⁰

As James Mann explains, during the 1980s, Beijing had observed that former US government officials and politicians “often sought to make money from their China connections” once they left office.⁷¹ The CCP was not shy about encouraging these “old friends” to weigh in on its behalf with their former colleagues, and the Chinese government also started to retain law and public relations firms in Washington for the same purpose.⁷² What was truly distinctive about the fight over MFN status, however, was not Beijing’s direct lobbying of US officials, but its broad, brazen, and systematic use of threats and inducements to shape the behavior of American companies, and through them the policies of the US government.

As early as 1990, a Chinese commercial counselor had written to American executives urging them to “display your impact” and “do some promotion work” with Congress, the White House, and the “news mediums [sic].” Exhortations were soon accompanied by action. Three years later, in the runup to yet another vote on MFN status renewal, Chinese trade delegations fanned out across the United States on a well-publicized, multi-city “shopping spree” that resulted in promises to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cars, planes, and oil exploration equipment. At the same time, albeit more discreetly, US companies were being “regularly threatened with cancellation of orders or loss of future deals” if China lost its preferred trade status.⁷³

By 1994, Beijing had honed its tactics to a fine edge, dispatching the “largest-ever trade and investment mission” and signing agreements worth a total of $11 billion with great fanfare, even as anonymous Chinese officials warned of unspecified “disastrous results” for American companies if MFN status was revoked.⁷⁴ At this point, writes David Lampton, “the essence of Beijing’s strategy” was to convince the United States that it was “isolated internationally” and risked ceding “the ‘big cake’ of the Chinese market to its competitors” if it did not abandon attempts to link trade to human rights.⁷⁵ The tactics employed were hardly subtle. In one notable instance, at virtually the same moment as President Jiang Zemin was visiting Boeing’s headquarters in Seattle and giving a speech in which he urged the removal of “negative factors and artificially imposed obstacles” to future business, a delegation of German executives was arriving in Beijing to ink an order for six aircraft from Airbus, Boeing’s archrival.⁷⁶ The message was clear: if Boeing did not do enough to “display its impact” in Washington, China would take its business elsewhere.

According to a senior figure at one of China’s leading think tanks, as the date for Clinton’s decision approached, “[W]e began to realize that economic interests were deepening and started to think that the US wouldn’t dare cancel MFN.”⁷⁷ This judgment turned out to be correct, but the analyst’s observation is incomplete and also rather coy. The mobilization of American business, and the political outcome that it helped to produce, were not simply the inevitable byproducts of an objective deepening in economic relations between the United States and China; they were the result also of a deliberate and highly orchestrated influence campaign by Beijing.

On May 26, 1994, President Clinton announced that he would not only renew China’s MFN status but also, henceforth, “delink human rights” from the annual process of extension.⁷⁸ Despite appeals from human rights advocates, labor unions, and the representatives of older manufacturing industries already feeling the weight of import competition from China, Congress voted to uphold this decision. The impact was immediate. With the specter of suspension removed, at least for another year, and China’s development back on track, trans-Pacific commerce was free to grow faster than ever before. Within weeks, companies like Caterpillar, Apple, Owens-Corning, and Kentucky Fried Chicken all announced plans for major new investments in China.⁷⁹

Seizing an opportunity to win greater support from the business community, President Clinton had shrewdly reversed course. Henceforth, he argued, the United States should seek to change China not by threatening to constrict trade, but by expanding it. As trade and investment compounded during the 1990s, so too did the breadth and depth of enthusiasm for ever-expanding economic ties. Annual Congressional debates over MFN status renewal would continue until the end of the decade, but after 1994 the issue was never seriously in doubt. Finally in 2000, at the urging of the White House, and in response to another powerful lobbying campaign, Congress voted to establish “permanent normal trading relations” with Beijing, abandoning what had become an increasingly empty threat and clearing the way for China’s entry into the WTO. The process of engagement had reached critical mass and was now self-sustaining, self-reinforcing, and, for all practical purposes, unstoppable.