Guest Post: China Reconsidered on WTO Accession

This article first appeared on Today in Alternate History.

July 1, 1998 - U.S. Senate Confirms VP Gephardt

Following the resignation of Bill Clinton, the United States Senate voted to confirm House Minority leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., as vice-president under the 25th Amendment. This emergency constitutional instrument had only been used once before with Congressman Gerald R. Ford when a vice-presidential vacancy had arisen after the resignation of Spiro T. Agnew. After the subsequent resignation of Richard M. Nixon, Ford immediately assumed the presidency.

Echoes of the Nixon presidency rebounded with both men resigning over abuses of power, though the circumstances of this appointment were a little different, especially given the turn of subsequent events. Clinton's timing gave his successor Al Gore a golden opportunity to change course on key policies that might not affect the midterm elections but certainly turn the forthcoming presidential election upside down. Gephardt, a protectionist, strongly urged him to reconsider China's Accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). This was mid-negotiation; General Secretary Jiang Zemin had visited the United States the previous fall, and Clinton had planned to pay a return trip this summer.

Global trade with China increased sevenfold since the 37th President's historic visit to Beijing. WTO accession was certainly a huge photo opportunity for the glory-hound Clinton, one the more camera-shy Gore failed to capitalize on. As with many of the hottest political topics, Clinton had been equivocal in the sense of being highly vocal on the positive spin and yet reluctant to own the full consequential effects for the American people. His presidency had started with an executive order (128590) that linked the renewal of China's Most Favored Nation (MFN) status with seven human rights conditions, including "preservation of Tibetan indigenous religion and culture" and "access to prisons for international human rights organizations." One year later, he reversed this position. Clinton subsequently determined that China should join the WTO as a non-market economy, allowing its trading partners, including the United States, to use a special framework to determine whether China's exports were being sold at unfairly low prices and, if that was found to be the case, to apply additional anti-dumping duties.

Gephardt strongly disagreed with Clinton's policy, demanding that annual trade reviews continue. The technical issue was China's shallow integration with the global economy. Certain sectors of the economy, such as distribution, telecommunications, and financial services, remained entirely or largely closed to foreign direct investment. High tariffs and an array of non-tariff barriers meant that some critical sectors of the Chinese economy remained relatively insulated from international competition. It was unclear whether Zemin could agree to Gore-Gephardt's tougher terms of China's protocol of accession to the WTO.

Lacking Clinton's charisma, Gore needed to build a substantive domestic policy platform, which was of course why he had chosen Gephardt. Gore had played a secondary role in the formation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) trade bloc. This was originally proposed during the Reagan era, but in the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton-Gore had to confront Ross Perot's populist warning of the "giant sucking sound [of US jobs] going south." Gore would famously appeared with Perot one year later for NAFTA discussions on Larry King Live. Feeling that he came across strongest on technical policy issues, Gore could play on legitimate fears that China's WTO Accession would have the same negative effect despite the opportunity for consumers to enjoy low-cost technology products that were becoming increasingly popular.

Five years after the Larry King show, Gore stole a trick from Perot by announcing that the U.S. government would enter regional trade negotiations to protect U.S. jobs but also help to develop technological and other manufacturing plants in Mexico and Brazil. As an environmentalist, he firmly believed that if more jobs were created for people to move to in the cities, less of the Amazon rainforest would be bulldozed by farmers. In so doing, he hoped to build a blue-collar/green alliance for his re-election campaign in 2000.

Even before then, Sino-American relations took a sour turn with the United States bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade coming only months ahead of the WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle.

Author's Note:

In reality, Clinton paid the return trip, the United States and China reached agreement on terms for China's entry into WTO after talks in Beijing in November 1999, subject to approval by Congress.

Provine's Addendum:

Gore's efforts to unite blue-collar workers and green initiatives had an economic side-effect of propping up the famed bubble of Dot-Com tech companies that had begun to struggle by the end of the '90s. With federal funds encouraging international relations in the Western Hemisphere, the companies found new avenues to promote themselves. Ultimately, however, the tech overreach could not be sustained, and, though Gore won in 2000 against George Bush, son of 41st President George Bush, the dire economic situation afterward blamed on Democrats made it clear that the 2004 presidency would go to a Republican.

Gore's position on international security also led to significant critique. After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, Gore demanded that Afghanistan give up Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda. Afghanistan's slow actions to do so under Taliban rule became an embarrassment, but Gore refused to mount a full-scale invasion, instead leaning on international policing and diplomacy. China became a crucial player in the issue, having already established relations with Lu Shulin, Chinese ambassador to Pakistan, becoming the first senior representative of a non-Muslim country to meet with Mullah Omar. After extensive international and internal cooperation, bin Laden was arrested in a isolated strike seizing his hidden camp on the Pakistani border in 2007.

The victory would be counted by President John McCain, who won a sweeping vote in 2004 but would lose in 2008 as another financial crisis struck, this time brought on by subprime mortgages and liberalized banking issues. As the US headed into the second decade of the new millennium, the world economic scope looked much different with China's New Silk Road initiative found new markets in Central Asia while the US continued to focus on developing trade partners in the Western Hemisphere, setting the stage for a new era of spheres of influence.