US manufacturing jobs went straight south after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, a development cheered by US Chamber of Commerce chairman Steve Van Andel of Michigan's AMWAY in the Chicom China Daily, US Independence Day 2001

US Chamber Backs China's WTO Entry : 

Steve Van Andel, the newly elected chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce, said on Monday that he was looking forward to China joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) sometime before the end of this year. He said this will pave the way for permanent normal trade relations between China and the United States.

"For US business, one of the best things that can happen to help confidence in the Chinese market is China becoming part of the WTO," Andel said in an interview with China Daily.

His remarks come at a time that China is hoping to enter the world trade body. The country hopes to join before a WTO ministerial meeting in Qatar between November 9 and 13.

China has concluded separate agreements with the United States and the European Union, the world's two top trading powers, in the last few weeks, promoting its WTO membership.

Although the US Congress last year voted for Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) between China and the United States, it still reviews its trade policy towards China every year until the country actually becomes part of the WTO.

"The chamber is already actively supporting normal trade relations with China again." Andel said.

The chamber, the world's largest commerce association representing 3 million US companies and 3,000 state and local chambers, has been committed to lobbying the US Congress to normalize trade relations with China.

He said he would go back to Congress soon after his visit to China to lobby for normal trade relations with China again.

A normal trade relation between China -- potentially the world's largest market with 1.3 billion consumers -- and the United States is very important to businesses in both countries, he said.

Last year, the trade volume between the two nations amounted to US$74.5 billion.

He said China's WTO entry would certainly benefit "not only better relations, but also more trade between the two markets.''

Andel said he would carry the same message during his talks with the Chinese leaders and government officials, including President Jiang Zemin over the next couple of days.

Andel will lead a US business delegation to China in September to attend a meeting organized by China's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation.

"I will also next year travel around the United States again, probably to 50 to 60 different local chambers talking about the importance of trade with China to US and Chinese businesses,'' he said.

Andel, chairman of US-based Amway, the global consumer goods giant, said China's WTO accession and normal trade relations between China and United States were expected to boost his company's business in China.

Amway, which has invested more than US$100 million in China, aims to increase its business in the country to 10 percent of its global turnover in a few years from the current level of 5 percent.

(Chinadaily.com.cn 07/04/2001)

 

 

Joel Kotkin has come around, now calls it what it is: Global fascism

In 2018, Kotkin was still tip-toeing around the obvious, but not anymore:

Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world . . .

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. ...

fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. ...

China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. ...

But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

Kotkin recognizes at least that American right-wing libertarianism is part of the problem, not part of the solution:

the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

Regrettably, however, Kotkin still does not connect this failure of the old liberal order in the West with the failure of the old moral order which gave it birth and on which it depended. This is because Kotkin still sees things in primarily materialistic terms.

Kotkin is oddly politically correct when he denounces possible recourse to nativism, which blinds him to the nativism which is at the heart of Chinese state capitalism and gives it much of its appeal and strength. He calls for "a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority" in the West, not realizing that it was Protestantism which made that even possible in the first place.

The problem of the West is spiritual, and Catholicism will never be able to rise to the occasion of refounding it as long as globo-homo defines Rome. The whole idea is inimical to the notion of founding a nation "for our posterity".