Clinton Will Renew China Trade Status -- Conditions May Include Gun-Import Ban
WASHINGTON - President Clinton has decided to renew China's trade privileges, but will set up a commission to examine human-rights abuses and may impose sanctions on Chinese-made guns, according to sources who were briefed on the decision.
A Chinese government spokesman in Beijing said today that any conditions on trading rights "would be unacceptable." But he did not say how China might respond to such steps.
With the decision, Clinton is abandoning the approach he proposed last year: using trade as leverage to improve human rights in China.
Administration officials said Clinton plans to drop, for the future, the presidential executive order he issued last year attaching a series of human-rights conditions to the renewal of China's trade status.
Billions of dollars in trade between the United States and China and access for U.S. companies to China's expanding market will be affected by Clinton's decision. Under "most favored nation" status, which is scheduled to expire for China on June 3, U.S. trading partners are permitted to ship goods at the lowest tariffs.
Clinton said this morning that an announcement could be made as early as today. He added, "I'll go back to work on it. I've got a number of phone calls to make."
The administration has been under intense pressure from the American business community to renew China's trade benefits. U.S. companies fear that, if the benefits were revoked, China would retaliate against American companies and simply deal instead with their European and Asian competitors.
Washington state is the nation's fourth-largest exporter to China, mainly due to sales by The Boeing Co. Boeing and other major local companies formed a coalition to support renewing China's trade status.
Trade with China also represents billions of dollars in business annually for the ports of Seattle and Tacoma.
While renewing trade benefits, Clinton plans to ban the importation of Chinese assault weapons to the United States, administration and congressional officials said yesterday.
The number of Chinese weapons imported to the U.S. has increased from 108,000 in 1991 to more than 1 million in 1993, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
But China exports more than $31 billion in products to the United States, and the guns and ammunition that would be affected by sanctions make up only a tiny share of these sales.
Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who has led a campaign for a ban, said a ban would send "a strong message that the United States will no longer allow China to turn our streets into killing fields with cheap semiautomatic weapons."
Sources said the planned human-rights commission would be headed by former President Jimmy Carter, who established diplomatic relations with the Beijing regime in 1979 while he was in the White House.
Human-rights groups have denounced the idea of a commission for China as a meaningless exercise.
"It would have no authority, no clout and no teeth," said Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director of Human Rights Watch (Asia).
The president's decision to renew the trade benefits would stand unless both houses of Congress pass a resolution to revoke it - and the battle lines were forming today on Capitol Hill.
Clinton struggled yesterday to gain the support of Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, the principal architect of the policy of linking trade benefits to human rights.
Mitchell more than anyone created the China issue that was used for years by congressional Democrats against former President Bush. In the years after China's bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations, he pressed for legislation attaching conditions to the renewal of China's trade benefits.
Clinton embraced Mitchell's approach during the 1992 campaign, accusing Bush of "coddling dictators" in Beijing and criticizing his veto of Mitchell's legislation.
Mitchell reportedly was pressing Clinton yesterday to impose broader, more significant penalties on all Chinese products made by the People's Liberation Army or by defense-related companies.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a leading advocate of trade sanctions, said renewing China's trade status without conditions would "abandon those who spoke out for democracy in China."
"The fact is that in China, serious repressions continue," she said, calling the idea of a commission "merely sweeping the Chinese human-rights violations under the rug."
But Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., a leading opponent of sanctions, said linking trade and human rights was "an artifact of the Bush administration."
"What we need is a new framework to engage China on human rights and a new economic relationship that will benefit both countries in the long run," he told NBC.
Under Clinton's 1993 order, China was required to open the way for emigration of the families of some dissidents; curb the export of goods made with prison labor; and make "overall significant progress" on releasing dissidents from prison and ending cultural and religious suppression in Tibet.
China has repeatedly denounced imposition of these conditions and has said that it will never be pressured into changing its domestic policies.
Over the last few months, while releasing a handful of well-known political prisoners, Chinese authorities also have rounded up a number of other dissidents.
In April, China once again arrested Wei Jingsheng, China's best-known proponent of democracy. Wei, who had been released in September after more than 14 years in jail, is still being detained.
Compiled from reports by the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Associated Press and Seattle Times business reporter Polly Lane.