The Progressive ResponseVolume 4, Number 40
Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)
Table of ContentsI. Updates and Out-TakesTHE BIG ISSUES IN U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS: THE SILENT
DEBATE CLIMATE JUSTICE BLUES
II. Letters and CommentsVOTE FROM YOUR FEARS, NOT YOUR HEART
I. Updates and Out-takes
THE BIG ISSUES IN U.S.–CHINA
RELATIONS: THE SILENT DEBATE In a presidential election in which foreign policy occupies a less than central role, it may come as no surprise that China and U.S.-China relations are virtually absent from the debate. As LA Times columnist Jim Mann observed regarding the presidential campaign and U.S. policy toward China, "The country ought to be having a debate, but instead our political leaders act as though they have all been afflicted by an epidemic of lockjaw." Indeed, there appears to be a more public debate in China about U.S.-China relations than in the United States. The debate within the U.S. over China’s accession to the WTO seemed to end with a whimper rather than a bang, with an 83-15 vote in the Senate approving PNTR for China. But, the debate over the WTO is not over. Furthermore, two other issues involving China that have global implications—nonproliferation, and climate change—are also effectively absent from the presidential campaign. Whoever wins the election, the U.S. public has been let down by a Clinton administration that has been unable to develop a coherent China policy outside of trade liberalization, and betrayed by a presidential campaign unwilling to address major foreign policy issues. WTO accession On November 2, negotiations will resume at the working group on China’s accession to the WTO. The 14-year-old talks on China's accession broke down in September after several important WTO members, led by the United States and the European Union (EU), insisted that China must not have one set of rules for its domestic economy and enterprises, and another for foreign companies and international trade. In September, the Chinese side backpedaled on its previous commitment to a timetable for opening its telecommunications market, reducing or abolishing export subsidies, and other market-opening measures. WTO Working Group members also maintained that given China's opaque legal system, the overall rules for it to join the trade body must be more stringent. Part of the problem for the current distrust about China's ability to comply with the WTO rules is that Beijing has not submitted its complete legislative plan on how it will conform with the trade body's complex rules. China said it would submit its proposed legislation plan of some 160 laws to comply with its WTO commitments, but so far it has placed only half of those laws for WTO members' consideration. China refused to give in to those demands, saying that it was not prepared to meet the "WTO-plus" conditions and what one Chinese official called "excessive demands concerning China's internal policies." China still has three main hurdles to overcome before accession. First it must hammer out a market-access schedule in Geneva. Then it must complete protocol documents outlining its other commitments under the WTO agreements. The protocol for accession is the legal scaffolding for China's membership in the WTO, and is prepared on the lines of bilateral agreements that Beijing has already signed with Washington, Brussels, and 33 other countries. Finally, it needs to finish its bilateral negotiations with Mexico. Most analysts say China will likely not enter the World Trade Organization until the first or second quarter of next year, although China still publicly insists that it hopes to gain membership before the end of 2000. Signs that China’s anti-liberalization forces are waging some fierce battles include:
China’s accession is hoped to spur an increase in foreign direct investment (FDI), which has slowed in recent years. Beijing has tried to supplement dwindling FDI flows with portfolio flows, and has raised more than $13 billion by listing shares of three its largest state-owned enterprises in New York, London, and Hong Kong. They included its two largest oil companies (PetroChina and Sinopec) and its second-largest telecommunications company, China Unicom. Future companies are likely to include Baoshan Iron & Steel, several banks, and more telecommunications firms. While providing fresh capital, these IPOs have also provided new leverage for both progressive and right-wing forces to advance their own agendas. In April, human rights groups, labor unions, environmentalists, and right wing anti-China groups—like the Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy (http://www.security-policy.org/papers/2000/00-F52.html)—campaigned against PetroChina’s IPO, with the effect of lowering the proceeds from the IPO by an estimated 50%, according to the Wall Street Journal. This informal PetroChina coalition also targeted the Sinopec IPO, although with less open fanfare and with less impact to date. In both cases the main issue was the companies’ operations in Sudan. Two days after Sinopec’s IPO, the Commission on International Religious Freedom sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the body that vets stock listings, asking the SEC to investigate the "accuracy and adequacy" of Sinopec's filing. The Commission charged that Sinopec's prospectus had "a material omission" because "nowhere does it disclose any assets or operations in Sudan." Activists are pushing for investors to divest themselves of Sinopec shares. Should Sinopec’s share price fall as a result of a divestment campaign, some activists are exploring the possibility of mounting class-action negligence suits against the SEC and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, the oil firm's underwriters. Such a campaign against a Canadian oil firm with operations in Sudan has met with some success. The AFL-CIO took a lower profile on Sinopec and is focusing on providing investors—such as American pension funds—with clear guidelines, including human rights criteria, to evaluate listings by companies from emerging markets. One of the union’s first targets will be China's planned sovereign bond issue in November. The opportunity for using access to U.S. capital markets as a tool for advancing a progressive foreign policy agenda is an important one—as long as China is not singled out. In response to nonproliferation concerns that briefly slowed the PNTR legislation in the Senate, evidence suggests that the Clinton administration is quietly negotiating a new arms-control agreement in which China would promise to stop supplying missile technology to Pakistan, Iran, and other countries. The movement toward a deal began in September, when China's top arms-control negotiator, Sha Zukang, met with officials from the National Security Council and the State Department, who were in Beijing to attend an arms-control conference. The deal would fall short of the administration’s oft-stated goal of bringing China into the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR—the accord signed by about 30 nations to restrict the export of missiles, missile parts, and know-how). (For links and background on this issue see http://www.fpif.org/papers/china/stumbling.html.) Policymakers and analysts are divided on both the administration’s stated goal of bringing China into the MTCR as well as the new agreement which tries to achieve the substance of MTCR membership without its actual formal status. Skeptics argue that China is unlikely to actually implement the agreement, while others suggest that China uses the prospect of joining the MTCR as a bargaining chip with the U.S. policy toward Taiwan and missile defense. Climate Change Meanwhile, with the sixth Conference of parties to the Climate Convention (COP 6) scheduled for later this month (November 2000), the role of China in the negotiations, and the growing centrality of China in the overall greenhouse debate is increasingly apparent. China is on track to become the world's number one emitter of carbon dioxide in 2020. China is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide (behind the U.S.) accounting for 14 percent of the planet’s total. By 2020 it is expected to surpass the U.S., emitting 18 percent of the world’s total. However, China emits four times less carbon dioxide per person than developed countries. China will approach the COP-6 ready to torpedo any proposal that seeks to impose restrictions on developing countries’ emissions, and is promoting along with India and a number of other Southern countries, a proposal to set equal per capita emissions limits. The Chinese government argues strongly against reviving the issue of cutting developing countries' carbon gas emissions, and instead argues that the 38 industrialized countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol should meet their commitments on cutting emissions and for funding and technology transfers for developing countries. The global effects of climate change are being felt within China as well. According to government data, the rise in temperature on the Tibetan plateau has exceeded the world average (up 0.8 degrees since 1950), threatening to dry up rivers which water a large part of Asia—such as the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Yellow River. According to the International Energy Agency, China's energy consumption will more than double in the next 20 years, particularly since 77 percent of its energy consumption is provided by coal. The increasing number of vehicles in China is also a significant factor in the worsening pollution situation. The five-year social and economic development plan recently adopted by the Communist party places a priority on the environment, but at the same time, promises to "boost capacity to buy personal cars," according to state media reports. China's pollution levels also carry a financial and health toll. After 20 years of rapid growth, the 1999 China Human Development Report estimates the cost of pollution on health and agriculture to be around eight percent of GDP. The U.S. response to these challenges is weak. In contrast to Japan’s environmentally oriented foreign aid, U.S. support is anemic, and provided largely through small, under-funded technical assistance initiatives under the auspices of the EPA. China is not eligible for funding from U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and is excluded from participating in the U.S.-Asia Environmental Partnership. Conclusion The failures of the Clinton administration to build an effective policy toward China is exacerbated by the fact that the presidential campaign has failed to address one of the central foreign policy relationships that will shape the future of the world. The U.S. public deserves a debate on these issues. (John Gershman can be contacted at <jgershman@igc.org>.)
CLIMATE JUSTICE BLUES In a few weeks, just a few, predictably strange days after the American elections, the climate negotiations (themselves pretty strange, though hardly short) will have a long-anticipated, critical, and entirely inevitable confrontation with global environmental justice. Still, you may not notice it. The stage on which the confrontation will unfold—COP6, the 6th Conference of the Parties to the climate convention—isn't likely to get much coverage, at least not here, and even if it does, "the equity issue" is too subterranean to be "news." Still, we can hope, and we should, for COP6 isn't just going to be the most crucial climate meeting since 1997's Kyoto showdown, it's going to be its completion. This November, the other shoe is going to drop. We won in Kyoto, or so it's said. But that was in simpler days, when winning only meant keeping the oil companies, the Saudis, and the rest of the Carbon Cartel from entirely derailing the negotiations. That was before the scientific consensus had firmed into its current, decisively grim outlines, back when you could pose as a "climate skeptic" and still hope to be taken seriously. That was back when the Kyoto compromise, pitched though it was exclusively to the rich North, could still look like victory. Now, three years further down the road, we're coming face to face with the stolid, implacable fact that an effective treaty has to actually work, and for the poor as well as for the rich. Unfortunately, COP6 is unlikely to do much in response. The negotiating focus, now, is writing the rules that will put meat on Kyoto's fragile bones, but strewn everywhere are the awkward implications of Kyoto's basic architecture. What's the problem? Only that we need a 60-80% reduction in global carbon-dioxide emissions, and that this almost incomprehensible reduction must come soon, even as the South, the old Third World, strains to follow us on the road to "development." Only that Kyoto promises the North continued access to its current, vastly disproportionate share of the global carbon budget, even as that budget shrinks, as the science says it must, and that, in direct consequence, Kyoto threatens to leave the "developing world" without any atmospheric space to develop into. How will COP6 end? No one knows. All we can say is that the pressure to keep "the process" together will be very high, that there will be drama and perhaps even breathless celebrations of an eleventh-hour victory. In any case, everyone will eventually go home, many of us on airline journeys that produce far more carbon pollution per passenger than our annual per capita share of the Earth's carbon-assimilative capacity. The optimists hope that, soon thereafter, an international effort to ratify the Kyoto Protocol will swing into high gear. It's more likely that COP6 will mark the point when even American environmental elites begin to quietly admit that the Kyoto Protocol, as we know it, is doomed. What's really on the agenda now is "Kyoto II," and one way or another its framers will have to address the world's division between the affluent and the aspiring, even as they contrive to draw down total global emissions into a "soft landing" corridor that avoids utter ecological catastrophe. The good news is that this is possible. New technologies can help, and if carbon-emissions markets grant us efficiency and are, thus, inevitable, so be it. But the situation is far too serious to indulge dreams of simple techno-economic salvation. A workable treaty must be founded on claims to common-sense justice, and it must explicitly accommodate the South's aspirations for development. Far from the spirit of "global environmental management," in which Northern greens have too often sought to reform the practices of the poor, it must look first to reform in the North and to the pathologies of affluence. Will there be meaningful participation by the South? The answer, actually, is pretty clear—only after there is meaningful participation by the North. Tom Athanasiou <toma@igc.org> is a free-lance green critic and the author of Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor (Little Brown, 1996).
II. Letters and CommentsYour article on Sri Lanka's Long War [http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol5/v5n35srilanka.html] is one of the most well-researched and compiled article that I ever seen regarding Sri Lankan issue. Apart from the facts, the recommendations presented were realistic and applicable in Sri Lankan issue. It seems that you have better understanding on this issue than Sri Lankan politicians. Hope your article will help few decision makers to understand Sri Lankan ethnic issue and an end to suffering of the people. - Logan Nagendran <LNagendran@dtss.com.sg>
VOTE FROM YOUR FEARS, NOT YOUR HEART Here in New Mexico, with our five electoral college votes up for grabs, I can't vote my heart or mind (i.e., for Nader). I will vote out of utter fear that Bush would blow everything, not just any environmental progress we've made, but... can you imagine Bush with Arafat!? This is a guy who, when asked in the third debate about which commitments of U.S. troops he approves of and which not, said he did not approve of Haiti because that was "nation building." But Lebanon (under Reagan) was a good intervention. You recall how disastrously that ended. And of course, the reason for that deployment was also "nation building." Tom Friedman of the NYT (Tues., Oct. 17) suggested that Jim Lehrer was remiss for not having followed with, "And what was it about our experience in Lebanon that you liked?" The man is clueless and because of that, dangerous. In California or Texas one may have the luxury to vote for Nader, but in New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Tennessee, Delaware etc., one does so by caprice, not by civic duty. - Peter Hebard, Albuquerque, NM
In your article [Sri Lanka's Long War, posted at http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol5/v5n35srilanka.html] you are making suggestions to discourage Sri Lanka's democratically elected government's antiterrorism effort. It is very sad that you have forgotten the fact that LTTE is funded by money from Western counties such as Canada, U.K., Australia. Why don't you talk about stopping or discouraging that? It looks as if you would like to see the separation of the island and thereafter the separation of India—and thereafter never-ending border conflicts like those between India and Pakistan. It looks like you are not working for peace, it looks like you are promoting terrorism in the world. LTTE is not willing to accept other than a separate state. Sri Lanka has been one country for more than two thousand years. Tamils started to migrate from Tamilnadu about 1600. Your organization should work more toward stopping the funding of terrorist organizations like LTTE. Then achieving peace will be more realistic. Some of your statements are not true. Majority of the Sinhalese believe what I say. - Samarasena Summith <ssumith@hotmail.com>
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