WHY TRADE WON'T BRING DEMOCRACY TO CHINA

July 6, 2001

On February 25, business professor and writer Li Shaomin left his home in Hong Kong to visit a friend in the mainland city of Shenzhen. His wife and nine-year-old daughter haven't heard from him since. That's because, for four months now, Li has been rotting in a Chinese prison, where he stands accused of spying for Taiwan. Never mind that Li is an American citizen. And never mind that the theme of his writings, published in subversive organs like the U.S.-China Business Council's China Business Review, is optimism about China's investment climate. Li, it turns out, proved too optimistic for his own good. In addition to rewarding foreign investors, he believed that China's economic growth would create, as he put it in a 1999 article, a "rule-based governance system." But, as Li has since discovered, China's leaders have other plans.

Will American officials ever make the same discovery? Like Li, Washington's most influential commentators, politicians, and China hands claim we can rely on the market to transform China. According to this new orthodoxy, what counts is not China's political choices but rather its economic orientation, particularly its degree of integration into the global economy. The cliche has had a narcotic effect on President Bush, who, nearly every time he's asked about China, suggests that trade will accomplish the broader aims of American policy.

Bush hasn't revived Bill Clinton's recklessly ahistorical claim that the United States can build "peace through trade, investment, and commerce." He has, however, latched onto another of his predecessor's high-minded rationales for selling Big Macs to Beijing--namely, that commerce will act, in Clinton's words, as "a force for change in China, exposing China to our ideas and our ideals." In this telling, capitalism isn't merely a necessary precondition for democracy in China. It's a sufficient one. Or, as Bush puts it, "Trade freely with China, and time is on our side." As Congress prepares to vote for the last time on renewing China's normal trading relations (Beijing's impending entry into the World Trade Organization will put an end to the annual ritual), you'll be hearing the argument a lot: To promote democracy, the United States needn't apply more political pressure to China. All we need to do is more business there.

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