Ever since the George H.W. Bush administration weighed its diplomatic options in those months of intense policy introspection following Tiananmen Square in 1989, I have supported the deepest possible engagement with China. Throughout the 1990s, along with many others working on trade issues, I participated in the perennial push to persuade Congress to grant China “Normal Trade Relations” status and, ultimately, to secure “Permanent Normal Trade Relations” designation, the last major hurdle to China’s joining the World Trade Organization.
Throughout the two decades following China’s 2001 WTO accession, I wrote dozens of articles and papers and gave scores of lectures and interviews arguing that U.S.-China engagement was a positive development for the United States, China, and the rest of the world. In response to concerns that China wasn’t fulfilling its obligations, I assured that frictions in the process were inevitable and manageable, and that the massive reform already undertaken was a down payment—evidence of Beijing’s commitment to full participation in the rules-based, liberal international order. A little more time and latitude were needed for Beijing to fully implement its WTO commitments and, in the process, become that more “responsible stakeholder.”
I asserted that frustrations and mounting tensions in the relationship would be tempered through the maturation of the rule of law in China, deepening commercial engagement, and the shock-absorbing properties of the Bush administration’s “Strategic Economic Dialogue,” the Obama administration’s “Strategic and Economic Dialogue,” other high-level engagements, the WTO dispute resolution process, and the negotiation of more comprehensive trade and investment agreements.
I opposed calls for an across-the-board 27.5 percent tariff on imports from China, prolongation of textile and apparel quotas, punitive treatment of Chinese exporters and U.S. importers under the “trade remedies” laws, and all other protectionist demands that materialized over the past few decades.
I argued that concerns about the effect of the value of China’s currency on the U.S. trade deficit were misplaced and that proposed measures to redress currency misalignment were cures worse than the disease. I reminded that the U.S. trade deficit is not a scoreboard and that bilateral trade deficits in a globalized economy are especially meaningless.
When the implications of the Great Recession were weighing heavily on American psyches, I warned that growing concerns about China’s intentions were outdated Cold War tropes, and that provocative media portrayals of a triumphalist, rising China were only feeding a hawkish, zero-sum narrative in the United States that could lead to a trade war or worse. I disagreed with the chorus of voices warning that China had abandoned meaningful reforms earlier in the decade and that what we were witnessing was the Chinese government’s unapologetic return to prominence in shaping the course of China’s economy.
I countered with certainty that if Beijing wanted to subsidize factory production, we Americans should be sure to thank them for their beneficence. Trade with China, I insisted, would foster the rise of a middle-class that would dilute the power of the central government and successfully assert its demands for political and civil liberties.
As my colleague Scott Lincicome meticulously documents in his comprehensive study rebutting the argument that it was a mistake to allow China into the global trading system, engagement with China made the U.S. economy more productive and Americans better off. Indeed, the benefits of the West’s welcoming and facilitation of China’s entry into the global system are legion. No other geopolitical unfolding including, especially, the putative dividends of decades of international development efforts, did more to reduce poverty and enable human flourishing (in China and across the developing world). Hundreds of millions more people would be living, today, in poverty, unable to harness their talents and have the impact they have had on their own lives and on global economic well-being had the United States turned its back on China after Tiananmen. That’s no small thing.
But I was wrong about a few things, too.
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