China Likely to Face Tougher Going in U.S.

WASHINGTON — The chaotic failure of global trade talks in Seattle is likely to stoke opposition in Congress to approving normal trade relations with China, analysts believe.

“It’s going to be more difficult in the wake of Seattle,” James R. Lilley, a former U.S. ambassador to Beijing and an advocate of trade liberalization with China, said in an interview Sunday. “The issue has hardened. It’s going to be tougher to sell.”

Comments from key opponents over the weekend would seem to confirm that view.

Approval by the House of Representatives of permanent normal trading status for China is a key Clinton administration foreign policy objective and is required if American business is to reap the benefits of concessions made by Beijing during long and arduous negotiations with the U.S. over the terms of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

Opponents of granting permanent normalization, including organized labor groups, environmentalists and human rights organizations, believe that approval would rob them of leverage to force changes they seek inside China.

A House vote on the issue is expected early next year.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, flush from his successful opposition to the WTO’s meeting in Seattle, has vowed that organized labor will work against normal trade links with China.

“We will oppose it until there are some rules that the Chinese are going to play by,” Sweeney said Sunday on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation. “That was our argument with the WTO: Make the rules before you admit China.”

A day earlier, Teamsters President James P. Hoffa likened the street demonstrations that occurred in Seattle to the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and ‘70s and predicted that they represented the start of a coalition between labor and environmental groups that will become a potent influence on the congressional vote on China.

“From here on out, this is going to be a coalition that’s going to have to be dealt with, that’s going to play a role in any type of dealings with China with regard to the normal trade relations . . . debate that’s coming up,” Hoffa told CNN.

Union leaders want to force labor standards onto the trade agenda both within the WTO and in U.S. relations with China. For them, that is key to reducing the impact of cheap foreign imports they see as taking away U.S. jobs. Environmentalists want Beijing to adopt regulations for its industrial sector, and human rights activists see trade as a wedge to force democratization.

New momentum for opponents of normal trade with China would constitute one more problem for President Clinton’s foreign policy, already sullied by his failure to save the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty from defeat in the Senate in October, then tarnished further by last week’s debacle in Seattle.

Talks between the U.S. and Beijing on China’s WTO entry were completed last month and brought the prospect of lower tariffs and greater openings for American companies in the world’s most populous market. Such concessions would significantly boost one of America’s single most important trade relationships, currently estimated at about $85 billion annually, and probably redress, at least partially, the huge imbalance of that trade in China’s favor.

Congressional approval of permanent normalization would also end the divisive, often bitter, annual debates in the House about granting a one-year renewal of normal trading status, a ritual on Capitol Hill since 1990.