by WorldTribune Staff, April 15, 2025 Real World News

In 2001, the World Trade Organization (WTO) admitted China as a permanent member.

In one fell swoop, “the WTO undermined its legitimacy and the global economic order it was built to safeguard,” Miles Yu wrote in a April 14 analysis for The Washington Times.

“The damage wasn’t inevitable. It was invited, and the United States opened the front door.”

President Bill Clinton signed the act that implemented PNTR for China in 2000.

Who opened the door to the communists?

That would be President Bill Clinton.

In a 2000 speech in which he called on Congress to approve China’s WTO membership and grant permanent normal trade relations, Clinton insisted: “I believe the choice between economic rights and human rights, between economic security and national security, is a false one.”

Clinton also insisted that welcoming China into the WTO would eliminate tariffs on information technology by 2005 and open Chinese markets to American-made goods without forcing American companies to outsource, partner with the communist state, or hand over trade secrets.

“We’ll be able to export products without exporting jobs,” Clinton said.

Yu, director of the Hudson Institute’s China Center and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, noted: “Two decades later, we know how tragically wrong that prediction was. The U.S. didn’t just export products. We exported millions of jobs, entire industries and a critical portion of our economic sovereignty.”

China should never have been allowed into the WTO, Yu contends:

“If it applied today under the same conditions, it wouldn’t qualify. Why? Because the promises China made to gain WTO membership have gone unfulfilled across virtually every category.

“Instead of phasing out state subsidies and ensuring a level playing field for U.S. competitors to its state-owned enterprises, as promised, China has doubled down, using state-owned enterprises as vehicles for state control and geopolitical leverage. These entities receive preferential access to capital, land and licenses, giving them an enormous advantage in domestic and international markets.”

Clinton’s claim that China joining the WTO would end coercive technology transfers has also never materialized.

“Despite formal language to the contrary, U.S. and other foreign firms continue to face de facto requirements to share sensitive technologies in exchange for market access,” Yu wrote. “What Clinton once hailed as ‘voluntary partnerships’ are, in truth, calculated shakedowns. Intellectual property protection, another core commitment, has improved on paper but remains a charade in practice. Local courts routinely favor Chinese firms, while American companies bleed billions of dollars in stolen innovations.”

Upon joining the WTO, communist leaders in Beijing committed to joining the organization’s Government Procurement Agreement “as soon as possible.” That was in 2001. China has still not joined.

“Foreign firms remain largely excluded from the trillion-dollar Chinese government procurement market, a blatant violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of its accession protocol,” Yu noted.

WTO membership also meant China’s banking, insurance and legal services would be opened to foreign competition.

“Here, too,” Yu pointed out, “China has maintained roadblocks, formal and informal: foreign banks face extensive licensing delays, insurers confront domestic favoritism, and law firms are boxed in by rules that inhibit independent operation. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has retained tight control over its currency, manipulating the yuan to give exporters a global pricing edge in direct defiance of WTO norms.”

Yu continued: “Yet perhaps the most damning evidence of China’s manipulation lies in the WTO’s dispute resolution system. Since 2019, the mechanism has been virtually paralyzed. Even before that, China managed to tilt the playing field by ensuring that cases against it were often reviewed by panels featuring Chinese officials or sympathetic voices. In recent cases, only one judge presided, and he is Chinese. If this is a court, it’s a mockery of justice.

“Through all this, the global business community has remained largely silent, not because it doesn’t see the violations but because it fears retaliation or losing access to the Chinese market.”

Since Clinton paved the way for their entry, the communists have used the WTO as a weapon — “a Trojan horse to flood world markets with subsidized goods, extract foreign technology, and expand its industrial base while protecting its economy from genuine competition,” Yu wrote.

As Peter Navarro wrote in “Death by China,” the U.S. has helped finance the rise of an economic adversary that exploits every weakness in the global trading system. China’s strategy is not reform but control. Its goal is not cooperation but dominance.

Support Free Press Foundation

The American Free Press is Back!

  Analyst: Blame Clinton, World Trade Organization for China’s threat to global economic order, WorldTribune.com

Source link