Communist China does not deserve membership in the World Trade Organization, and its Most Favored Nation trade status with the United States should be terminated.
The Chinese government is actively pirating products and technology patented, copyrighted, and trade-marked in America. The Chinese have stolen computer programs, pharmaceutical products, agricultural chemicals, musical recordings, videos, automotive designs, and other intellectual properties created by, and rightfully belonging to, American citizens and businesses. Chinese factories churn out counterfeit CDs, videos, and computer programs by the thousands every day, selling their bootleg booty around the world. These Chinese bandits are costing Ameri-can manufacturers $1 billion per year in lost exports. Lost exports mean lost jobs, in this case as many as 20,000. Given these unpleasant facts, the question that needs to be asked is: Why have we been so nice to China lately?
William Gill of the American Coalition for Com-petitive Trade offers a persuasive explanation. "A small but influential army of Chinese nationals raised millions of dollars for President Clinton's reelection campaign last year," Gill observes. He charges that "one of the payoffs for their generous donations to the Democratic National Committee was White House approval for leasing the Long Beach, California naval base to the China Ocean Shipping Company -- without any national security review." Gill emphasizes that "COSCO was known to be implicated in the smuggling of several thousand AK-47 rifles shipped from China for use by street gangs in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities."
Ceding an American navy base to Chinese communists represents the sacrifice of national security to greed. "In late March," Gill reports, "the Long Beach Harbor Commission rejected protests of thousands of citizens based on national security concerns and announced it would go ahead with the plans approved by Clinton." Gill points out that COSCO "already has an 81-acre import facility in Long Beach harbor [and] a number of other strategic offices and installations around our country."
It's hard to keep count of the COSCO quid pro quos. "A COSCO subsidiary will receive a U.S. government loan guarantee to have four big container ships built by Alabama Shipyard Inc. in Mobile," Gill notes. "And COSCO ships now freely enter a dozen U.S. ports without providing the four-day notice long required for foreign vessels sailing into militarily sensitive harbors."
But that's not all. "Bill Clinton has given his nod to Chinese control of the Panama Canal," says Gill, and his new Trade Representative, Charlene Barshefsky, has recently sounded "an optimistic note about China's entry into the World Trade Organization." Gill is convinced that the Clinton administration plans to use China's anticipated membership in the World Trade Organization as a selling point in Congress when it proposes permanent Most Favored Nation status for that brutal and treacherous regime. Gill argues that child and slave labor practices make China unfit for membership in the World Trade Organization. And assaults on our national security make China unfit to be a Most Favored Nation.
