Home | Subscribe | Index
Special Reports | Order past issues
Table of Contents

Anniversaries & Annual Rituals

Examining the roots of Chinese reforms, and of US trade policies, sheds light on current affairs in Beijing and Washington

Robert A. Kapp

Two anniversaries deserve a word in my letter this month. First, our own. The US-China Business Council (previously called the National Council for US-China Trade) came into being in May 1973, at the instance of a group of far-seeing public servants and private individuals. Some of our Councils terrific young staff today were not born, or were in their infancy, when the Council was established at the dawn of the contemporary US-China era. But for me, for some of our more seasoned Council staffers, and certainly for many veterans in the US business community, it is interesting to think, "Where was I in May 1973", when the Council began? I was just finishing my first three-year teaching stint, in Houston, and embarking for job number two in Seattle, settling into an academic career. I had just met, with excitement, my first academic visitor from the PRC. Nearly four more years would pass before I would make my first visit to China.

So much water has flowed under the bridge. The US-China Business Council has endured, expanded, and matured with the US-China economic relationship, and we look forward to serving the growing Ameri can business engagement with China in the years to come. Council members and guests will have much to celebrate and to reflect upon at the 25th Anniversary Gala in Washington in June.

The other anniversary is a Chinese one and a centenary. Long before Americas Hundred Days of 1994, or the Roosevelt Hundred Days of 1933, China experienced the Hundred-Day Reform of June 11 to September 22, 1898. Briefly, and much too simply, the events were as follows: the young emperor Guangxu threw himself into a rapid-fire series of imperial reform edicts, at the recommendation of a brilliant Confucian reformist scholar-bureaucrat from Guangdong Province named Kang Youwei. Kang was one of a growing number of more outward-looking imperial scholar-officials conscious of Chinas impending collapse under foreign aggression and internal pressures. He convinced the emperor that only by fundamentally rearranging the institutions of government from the throne down establishing a constitutional monarchy, revamping the discredited imperial education system, modernizing the army along Western lines, and dismissing legions of corrupt and professionally incompetent officialscould the ruling dynasty save China from destruction. With Kang at his side on a special court appointment, the emperor issued edict after edict through the summer of 1898, bringing elation to the reformist scholar-officials but scandalizing many whose vested interests were t hreatened by these structural changes.

After 100 days of bold imperial announcements, the empress dowager Cixi, who had ruled as regent during the emperors childhood, had the young emperor seized and placed under house arrest, from which he never emerged before his death (a day before the dowagers) in 1908. Those endangered by the emperors radical reform proposals--powerful eunuchs and courtiers, old-style military chieftains threatened by military modernization, conservative ideologues contemptuous of non-Chinese cultures and fearful of losing their cultural domination over the imperial court--rallied to destroy both the reforms and their authors. Several of the boldest reform advocates were arrested and executed. The Guangdong figures who converted the emperor to the cause of far-reaching institutional reform escaped to British Hong Kong and thence to Japan with their lives.

While the Hundred Days of 1898 program failed, it left an important legacy for future reformers, and important lessons for future revolutionaries. The centenary of the Hundred Days is a reminder not only of the persistence of key themes throughout the history of twentieth century China, but also of the extraordinary depth of change and progress that China has achieved amid political upheaval, invasion, civil war, social transformation, and economic development.

Annual rituals, one more time

As for more immediate ann ual rituals, we now face the 1998 debate over continuation of normal trade relations between the United States and its fourth-ranked trade partner, China. In an effort to restate the central points in a new way this year, I offer the following menu of terms:

MFN = ET MFN is Everyday Trade (ET). It is the trade basis that we adopt for nearly all of our approximately 200 trading partners worldwide, including China. The handful of countries that do not trade with us on this basis include such countries as Afghanistan. MFN is not Most Favored anything--it is Everyday Trade.

Annual MFN = YET Annual MFN is Yearly Everyday Trade (YET). China is the only significant US trade partner over whom the American political system undergoes a season of hyperventilation and virulent domestic political accusation each year. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974--a Cold War device aimed at compelling the now-defunct Soviet Union to permit Jewish emigration--set into law a Not Unless system of annual reaffirmation of MFN/ET trade for non-market economies. China has moved on, laboring to deconstruct its decrepit non-market institutions without creating social chaos. But Jackson-Vanik, and the mischief that flows from it, remain stubbornly rooted in the truths of the 1970s.

Permanent MFN = SET Permanent MFN is Sustained Everyday Trade (SET). The annual battle royal over MFN/ET renewal consumes thousands of hours of time every year on the part of Congress, business, the White House, the media, and a wide array of non-trade interest groups, poisoning the air between the two nations while providing positive benefits only to the cottage industry that makes its living from the predictable yearly mobilization. Establishment of sustained everyday trade is long past due, and with it, the liberation of legions of increasingly exasperated battlers on both sides of this unproductive conflict.

WTO = GET WTO is Global Everyday Trade (GET). The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the rule-setting body that brings disparate nations trade practices into harmony. Nations with largely open economies, like the United States, look to the global trade rules of the WTO to ensureand compelmarket opening in more closed economies. Closed or protectionist economies must commit to opening up, or they don't get in.

The June Clinton-Jiang Summit in Beijing needs to deliver C-JET, Clinton-Jiang Enhancement of Trade. It is time for the two nations, led by their respective presidents, to close the gap on Chinese accession to the WTO. Time is not on the side of those who would delay.

Lets hope for real C-JET at the June summit. It is time to put the two governments' weight behind decisive progress on GET--the WTO issue. With definitive gains on GET, t he US must grant SET, permanent MFN, without delay. That would produce NYET--No Yearly Everyday Tradethe end of annual MFN at last, removing an anachronistic irritant to a US-China relationship now showing unmistakable signs of wide-ranging improvement.

None of this will happen without controversy in the United States. That controversy demands that we FRET--Frequently Reiterate Essential Truths--in Washington and Beijing. The US-China Business Council will do its part.

Return to The China Business Review Table of Contents

Last Updated: 19-May-98