China Trade — Without Guilt - It is logical, moral, and right

National Review, May 14, 2001 by Richard Lowry

Economic liberty, the rule of law, and privately held wealth are all crucial ingredients to political liberalization. But suggesting a relationship between economic development and liberalization is often dismissed by critics as a quasi-Marxist economic determinism. Instead, it is watered-down John Locke: The connection between economic liberty and political liberty is central to the most admirable strain of Western political thought. The correlation between the two is also a fact. The neoconservative Project for the New American Century in a 1999 memo opposing MFN called the connection "an interesting theory, but just a theory." It would be more accurate to say it's an observation, based on, among other things, the recent history of Asia.

It is Taiwan-on whose behalf critics of China trade sometimes say the mainland needs to be isolated-that is the prime exhibit for the political benefits of economic growth. As Taiwan became steadily more economically advanced and integrated into the world economy over the last thirty years, it also progressed from a one-party system to the constitutional democracy of today. South Korea followed roughly the same path. As the Hoover Institution's Henry S. Rowen has noted, countries tend to tip into democracies when their per capita annual GDP reaches $5,000 to $7,000. "Spain, Portugal, Chile, and Argentina, in addition to Taiwan and South Korea," Rowen writes, "all made the transition to democracy while they were in this income range."

If current trends hold, China will reach this level of wealth in fifteen to twenty years. This doesn't mean that China will join the WTO, then immediately break out the Magna Carta. The regime will bully, cheat, kill, and maim, in an effort to resist political liberalization every step of the way. (Its model may be Singapore, a rich one-party state-although one, it's worth noting, that allows considerable personal and economic liberty.) Indeed, as economic growth increases the possibility of personal freedom, it will also create more occasions for repression in China. Trade will not directly change the regime, but instead the society around it, thus creating the conditions for liberalization over the long haul.

Critics of China trade don't have the patience to wait for this long- term loosening and instead want the gratification of doing something, of isolating China, now. In a sense, the post-World War II period has already been a test of these two rival approaches. As Owen Harries has written in The National Interest, "For more than two decades-from 1949 to the early 1970s-the United States tried containing and, within its means, isolating China. That period was one of the most disastrous not only in Chinese history but in all of human history: a ruthless tyranny prevailed, millions of Chinese were killed by the regime or died because of its insane policies, obscurantism ruled, the economy was reduced to a shambles. Internationally, China actively supported subversion and insurrection throughout its region, fought a war against India, and even tried its hand at intervention in Africa."