How Free Trade With China Politically Impoverished Both Countries

In contract negotiations between labor and management, it is not uncommon for both sides to agree to kick the can down the road on certain issues. Management might extract a smaller salary increase now in exchange for labor’s demand for more generous pensions or retiree benefits later on.

It’s one area where unions tend to be better at long-term thinking than corporate managers, although the effect is often to plant the seeds of a future corporate bankruptcy or takeover. Still, when the deal is announced, everyone likes it, and everyone maintains it was a good deal until it is too late.

That pattern of procrastination and willful blindness is also evident in our trade agreements with communist China. Since the United States normalized trade relations with China in 2000 and agreed to let China join the World Trade Organization in 2001, we have been delaying the inevitable reckoning in much the same way.

While we hoped freer trade with the West would lead China toward liberal democracy, their oppressive government has only become stronger. Thirty years after communists crushed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, they look to do the same to the like-minded, peaceful gatherings in Hong Kong.

The totalitarian regime has not changed one iota in its aim to control the people of China. The only difference is in our gentle treatment of them since the Cold War, which gives Red China the leverage to snub its nose at human rights while devouring our industrial economy. In 1989, we had leverage to demand change. Now we have far less.