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Partito Radicale Michele - 21 settembre 2000
NYT/China/Senate Votes to Lift Curbs on U.S. Trade With China

The New York Times

Wednesday, September 20, 2000

Senate Votes to Lift Curbs on U.S. Trade With China

By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - After a long and often tumultuous struggle, a bill to remove restraints on trade with China passed the Senate today in a strong bipartisan vote, giving President Clinton what he considered one of his crowning foreign policy goals.

Coupled with approval by the House in May, the vote today ended the annual Congressional review of China's trade status, a ritual for 20 years that Beijing considered degrading but that critics argued was necessary to force China to improve its record on human rights and religious freedom.

After the historic vote, which passed with little debate today, Mr. Clinton told reporters, "This landmark agreement will extend economic prosperity at home and promote economic freedom in China, increasing the prospects for openness in China and a more peaceful future for all of us." [Transcript and roll call, Page A16.]

The broad margin of the victory, 83 to 15, was all the more remarkable coming less than two months before the presidential election, and after nine months of passionate debate. It demonstrated how a foreign policy issue could retain bipartisan backing even in the heat of a campaign.

Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the Republican presidential nominee, has supported the legislation. After the vote, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, Ray Sullivan, said, "This measure will help open markets to American products and help export American values, especially freedom and entrepreneurship."

Although Vice President Al Gore feared losing the support of allies in organized labor who opposed the measure as a threat to union jobs, he voiced qualified support for it today. But he stressed that American workers' rights must be protected. "We must combat unfair trade practices abroad when they harm our working families," Mr. Gore said.

Senate supporters hailed the deal, which will expand a vast overseas market for American goods, as a path-breaking step toward a new economic and security relationship. Senator Fred Thompson, a Tennessee Republican who tried unsuccessfully to amend the bill to penalize Chinese companies that export advanced weapons, voted for it but said he would continue to press China to curb its arms trafficking.

"Generally, free trade leads to freer markets, and freer markets can lead to more open societies," Mr. Thompson said in a statement. "I will keep pushing to hold the Chinese accountable for their actions."

Passage of the measure ensures that the United States will benefit fully from a market-opening accord that Washington and Beijing negotiated in November to slash Chinese tariffs on a range of farm and industrial products and removes barriers to American service providers, like banks and telecommunications companies. Almost everything from apples to wine will have a better chance of getting into the Chinese market.

The November agreement paves the way for China to enter the World Trade Organization, the 135-member group that sets the rules for global commerce. China will join the organization, probably later this year, and would have done so regardless of the vote today. But without Congress's blessing, China could have withheld some trade benefits from the United States that it extended to other members of the group.

"For U.S. farmers, businesses and working people, this agreement opens up a range of opportunities in China across all sectors and all fields of a magnitude unprecedented in the modern era," said Charlene Barshefsky, the United States trade representative. Some parts of the pact have taken effect, she said, noting that orange exports to China from Florida and California, for instance, have risen 100-fold since May.

Dave McCurdy, president of the Electronic Industries Alliance, said, "From semiconductors to circuit boards, from PC's to cell phones, China is simply the most dynamic international market for U.S. high- tech exports."

Overall, the United States bought $82 billion worth of Chinese-made goods last year, $69 billion more than the value of what it sold to China. The trade deficit, America's second-largest, was slightly smaller than the one with Japan.

The bill's supporters warned that several challenges remain in dealing with China, most immediately resolving disputes over some agriculture tariffs and how Taiwan will join the Word Trade Organization at the same time as China. "We've got a lot of work ahead of us," said Senator Max S. Baucus, Democrat of Montana.

The outcome of the vote today was never in doubt. The fierce lobbying that pitted corporate America against labor and religious groups before the House's approval of the measure in May, by a vote of 237 to 197, never materialized in the upper chamber because all sides knew the question in the pro-trade Senate was never if the measure would pass, only when and by how much.

But supporters still faced a delicate procedural and political balancing act in the Senate, where lawmakers zealously guard their prerogatives and a lone senator has the power to delay the most popular bill.

Backers of the legislation said it was essential to press for a measure free of amendments because there was not enough time to reconcile an amended Senate bill with the House version before Congress adjourned for the year. "We knew we had the votes, but what was difficult was that there was no margin for error in the Senate," said Steve Ricchetti, a deputy White House chief of staff who was Mr. Clinton's point man for the bill in the Senate. "It had to pass exactly as it passed out of the House."

So supporters adopted a low-key strategy aimed at leaching from Senate consideration all of the volatile politics that enmeshed the House vote. Tactically, that meant having Mr. Clinton - who eight years ago was on the opposite side, criticizing President George Bush's policy of engagement with China - project enough support to show that he still cared deeply about the bill, but not raise the debate temperature high enough to prompt some foes to take the bill hostage to delay it.

When Mr. Clinton's original point man on the bill, Commerce Secretary William M. Daley, left the Cabinet in June to head Mr. Gore's presidential election campaign, some supporters worried that momentum was slipping away.

The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, balked at scheduling a vote before the July 4 recess, arguing that the Senate had more pressing business in wrapping up many of the 13 must-pass spending bills that keep the government running. "If we go into September, our chances for passage drop precipitously," Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, warned in late June.

And for a while, critics seemed to have a point. Just as the vote in the House created unusual political alliances between liberal labor groups and conservative religious organizations in opposition to the bill, the Senate bill produced odd political couplings. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, perhaps the Senate's most liberal Democratic member, teamed up with Jesse Helms of North Carolina, one of the staunchest Republican conservatives, to back amendments on human rights, religious freedom and prison labor.

But the gloomy predictions proved wrong. Mr. Lott and Democrats agreed in late July to bring the bill up for a final vote after the five-week summer recess. Despite its long-simmering tensions with Taiwan, Beijing heeded private warnings from administration officials to avoid any diplomatic or military provocations that could fuel opposition to the bill.

The trade bill never became a political football, partly because pro- trade Republicans were loath to antagonize their corporate benefactors in a hotly contested election year, and labor leaders never believed that they could win enough Democrats.

One after another, 20 different amendments to improve human rights, religious freedom and labor standards in China fell by lopsided votes, not because senators opposed them on merit but because of their potential harm to the underlying bill.

A similar fate awaited the most popular amendment, sponsored by Mr. Thompson and Robert G. Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey, to penalize Chinese companies that trafficked in nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and long-range missiles. The measure struck an especially strong chord with lawmakers who had grown increasingly alarmed by intelligence reports of Chinese arms exports.

In the vote, all but 7 Democrats and 8 Republicans supported the bill. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who is Mr. Gore's running mate, was campaigning in California and Ohio and did not vote. Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, also did not vote.

Supporters said the agreement would benefit American business and values. "The Senate has cast an epic and overwhelming vote today," said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York. "By so doing, we bring China back into the trading system that it helped to establish out of the ashes of the Second World War."

But opponents criticized the measure as one that would undercut America's moral authority in the world, and reward a government that threatens its neighbors, persecutes its citizens and sells advanced weapons to America's enemies.

"The safety and security of the American people come first," Mr. Helms said. "That safety and security will be ensured ultimately not by appeasement, not by the hope of trade at any cost, but by dealing with Communist China without selling out the very moral and spiritual principles that made America great in the first place."

China Applauds Bill's Passage

SHANGHAI, Wednesday, Sept. 20 - China's Foreign Ministry today heralded the Senate's approval of the bill removing restraints on trade as paving the way for more stable relations with Washington.

At the same time, China criticized clauses in the bill intended to maintain pressure on Beijing to improve its human rights record. Hu Chusheng, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, reiterated irritation at the human rights monitoring panel in the trade bill, saying it "still contains certain clauses that are irrelevant to trade and are intended to interfere in the internal affairs of China."

 
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