Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 27, 1994 TAG: 9405270121
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM RAUM ASSOCIATED PRESS Note: lede
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Clinton on Thursday ended the link many Democrats in the past had insisted be maintained between human rights and trade with China.
Clinton himself had attacked George Bush during the 1992 presidential campaign for ``coddling tyrants'' in Beijing.
Thursday, he did offer a few gestures to human-rights activists - banning imports of Chinese-made guns and intensifying programs to reach out to Chinese dissidents and pro-democracy advocates.
But there was no mistaking that he was making a clear break with the past policy.
``This decision clearly shows the president's commitment to the power of expanding trade and exports as the best job-creating policies available,'' said Jerry Jasinowski, president of the National Association of Manufacturers.
Jasinowski said ``you see a theme emerging.'' He cited Clinton's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement last year, in which he opposed important Democratic constituencies like labor unions for a business-backed program that sponsors said would increase trade and jobs.
In explaining his change of course, Clinton noted that American businesses export $8 billion in goods to China. He said that translated to more than 150,000 jobs. China has become the world's third-largest economy - after the United States and Japan. Its economy dwarfs those of five of the ``Group of Seven'' nations that hold annual economic summits with the United States: Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Canada.
``The delinking of trade with human rights is really the critical factor here,'' said Robert Hormats, a former State Department official in the Carter and Reagan administrations who is now a trade expert with the New York brokerage house Goldman Sachs. He said the consequences of revoking it - or attaching more conditions - would have been far worse for the United States internationally.
``We don't need to go through an annual root canal agonizing over this every year. It's very destructive to our relations with China,'' Hormats said.
The United States also needs China's help in pressuring North Korea to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons program - cooperation that might have evaporated had he revoked favored status.
Clinton insisted that tying human rights to trade had outlived its usefulness.
``The question is how we can best support human rights in China. I believe we can do it by engaging the Chinese,'' he said.
He will take some political blows for flip-flopping on the issue. But Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, suggests Clinton's earlier tough statements ``allowed us to achieve the progress that has been achieved this year'' in getting Beijing's attention on human rights.
It may have taken a proven anti-Communist Republican president like Richard Nixon to first open the economic door to China two decades ago. And, by the same token, it might have required a Democrat who had championed human rights like Clinton to finally severe the links between trade and human rights with that Asian superpower.
by CNB