【政客新闻网11.22】The GOP's China syndrome

lilyma06

The GOP's China syndrome                 
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/68952.html
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   'They're stealing our jobs. And we're gonna stand up to China,' Romney recently said. |                                      AP Photo                                                         
                                                                                       
                                
                        
By JOSH GERSTEIN | 11/22/11 2:30 PM EST                                  Updated: 11/22/11 3:48 PM EST                                       
Mitt Romney says America is at war with China — a “trade war” over its undervalued currency. “They’re stealing our jobs. And we’re gonna stand up to China,” the former Massachusetts governor declared in a recent Republican presidential debate, arguing that the United States should threaten to impose tariffs on Chinese imports.
When Romney steps on stage tonight for another debate, this one devoted to foreign policy, that kind of China-bashing is likely to be a favorite theme. With a moribund economy, and relatively little traction for other international issues, the threat posed by cheap Chinese imports and Chinese purchases of U.S. debt is an irresistible target.
                                

The problem, China experts are quick to point out, is that those attacks often fly in the face of the business interests Republicans have traditionally represented, not to mention the record many of the candidates have either supporting trade with China - or actively soliciting it.

Just last year, for example, Romney slammed President Barack Obama for growth-killing protectionism after he put a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tires because of a surge of cheap imports. And, Romney wrote in his book, “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness,” “Protectionism stifles productivity.”
And though Texas Gov. Rick Perry predicted at a debate this month that “the Chinese government will end up on the ash heap of history if they do not change their virtues,” a picture posted on the Internet shows a smiling Perry on a trade mission to Shanghai and Beijing posing with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi after presenting him with a pair of cowboy boots.
Nor has Perry been shy about encouraging Chinese investments in Texas: In October 2010, he appeared at the announcement of a new U.S. headquarters for Huawei Technologies to be located in Plano, Tex., despite lingering concerns of U.S. security officials that Huawei-made telecommunications equipment is designed to allow unauthorized access by the Chinese government.
“There’s a certain pandering going on,” said Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who adds that and the GOP rhetoric is squarely at odds with the views of the U.S. establishment, which believes a showdown with China over the trade issue “will make things worse, not better.”
Not all of the 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls have taken to publicly pummeling Beijing. The only bona fide China expert in the group, former U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, has criticized Romney for being cavalier and simplistic in his talk of tariffs. “You can give applause lines and you can kind of pander here and there. You start a trade war if you start slapping tariffs randomly on Chinese products based on currency manipulation,” Huntsman said at a recent debate. “That doesn’t work.”
Former Sen. Rick Santorum also rejected the idea of slapping tariffs on Beijing if it won’t buckle on the currency issue. “That just taxes you. I don’t want to tax you,” Santorum said.
Newt Gingrich says he wants to bring a world of hurt down on Beijing for alleged Chinese cyberattacks on the U.S. and theft of intellectual property, though he’s vague about how. “We’re going to have to find ways to dramatically raise the pain level for the Chinese cheating,” the former house speaker declares.
And Herman Cain talks of a threat from China, but says the answer is to promote growth in the U.S. “China’s economic dominance would represent a national security threat to the USA, and possibly to the rest of the world,” Cain wrote in May in the Daily Caller. “We can outgrow China because the USA is not a loser nation. We just need a winner in the White House.”
Romney’s rhetoric has been particularly harsh. “It’s predatory pricing, it’s killing jobs in America,” he declared at the CNBC debate earlier this month, promising to make a formal complaint to the World Trade Organization about China’s currency manipulation. “I would apply, if necessary, tariffs to make sure that they understand we are willing to play at a level playing field.”
                                                               
                                                        

The Romney campaign insists those tariffs are entirely distinguishable from the tire duties Obama imposed in 2009.

“The distinction between Obama’s tire action and what Governor Romney is proposing is simple,” said a Romney aide who did not want to be named. “President Obama is not getting tough with China or pushing them unilaterally, he is handing out political favors to union allies. [Romney’s] policy focuses on fostering competition by keeping markets open and the playing field level.”
Romney, who helped set up investment bank Bain Capital group, has long been a favorite of Wall Street, so his stridency on the China trade issue has taken some traditional conservatives - for whom free trade is a fundamental tenet - by surprise. National Review said Romney’s move “risk[ed] a trade war with China” and was “a remarkably bad idea.”
In fact, many business leaders give Obama good marks for his China policy.
“What the Obama administration has done in not labeling China as a ‘currency manipulator’ is correct,” said one U.S. business lobbyist who closely follows U.S.-China trade issues and asked not to be named. “We’re very leery of a tit for tat situation,” he added, while acknowledging that the anti-China rhetoric is “good politics.”
While the Obama Treasury Department has refused to label China as a “currency manipulator,” which would have no concrete consequences under current law, Obama did so in passing at a news conference last month before declaring that he needed to “be careful” about using such “a term of art.”
Obama’s rhetoric and policy towards Beijing has also grown tougher in some aspects in recent months. His recent trip to Asia and Australia highlighted military moves designed to push back against some of China’s assertions of power the region. On the currency issue, Obama signaled that the patience of the U.S. and other nations with China is wearing thin.
“The United States and other countries, I think understandably, feel that enough is enough,” the president said.
“Republicans don’t want to acknowledge that the administration has made progress and the administration doesn’t want to claim it’s made progress in part because the unemployment rate is too high for them to try to make the case that [China’s] currency appreciation has gone part of the way to alleviating these big global trade imbalances,” Lardy said.
Still, the strident anti-China tone in the GOP primary doesn’t seem to have rattled the Chinese as much as in the past, said Orville Schell of the Asia Society.
“Initially, the Chinese were very offended by these statements, but over the last few years they’ve acquired a more sophisticated knowledge about the almost craziness that comes over a country during the campaign. They’re beginning to understand they should not react to everything….Things usually settle down afterwards,” Schell said.
The track record from recent U.S. campaigns underscores the wisdom of taking anti-China rhetoric with a large grain of salt.
In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan promised to reject limits on arms sales to Taiwan. Two years later, in deference to China, he agreed to rein in such sales.
                                

In 1992, a few years after China’s deadly suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square, candidate Bill Clinton’s campaign blasted President George H. W. Bush for coddling the “butchers of Beijing” and giving most-favored-nation trading status to “Chinese communists who deny their people’s basic rights.” Yet, within months of taking office, Clinton extended China’s trade status.

And in 2008, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, citing human rights concerns, called on President George W. Bush to boycott the first Olympics ever held in Beijing. (Bush went anyway.) A year later, Clinton headed to Beijing as secretary of state with a conciliatory message seen as downplaying human rights concerns.
As senators and presidential candidates, Obama and Clinton also co-sponsored legislation to put duties on Chinese goods if China didn’t allow its currency to appreciate. As executive branch officials they’ve done nothing to move towards punishing Beijing over the currency issue.
“When you really begin to govern, I don’t think the position has ever been as strong as during the campaign,” said Larry Wortzel, a Republican appointee to the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. “That has never panned out in terms of hard policy.”
Wortzel, a longtime China hawk, says he expects this year’s set of rhetorical salvos at Beijing to be a bit more intense but to basically follow the same pattern.
“China, writ large, has a huge target on its back in the campaign [but] there is such a disconnect between rhetoric and between action,” Wortzel. The discrepancies between what candidates say about China and how they’ve dealt with China aren’t particularly surprising given the way the U.S. as a whole is simultaneously dependent on China and acutely wary of its rise.
“The country as a whole is schizophrenic when it comes to China policy,” Wortzel said.
But some of the remarks by GOP candidates have been particularly puzzling to China watchers.
Last month, Romney suggested he’d welcome it if the Middle Kingdom took over the U.S. role in providing humanitarian assistance to countries around the world.
Schell said questioning borrowing to pay for aid made some sense, but Romney’s suggestion that the U.S. would benefit from China taking up the slack is “utterly contradictory” with the views of American China hawks who fear Beijing rising influence worldwide through both trade, aid and a growing military.
“Americans would become tremendously uneasy if the Chinese move into what is in some ways a real vacuum” caused by the U.S. pulling back overseas, Schell said. “If China sort of starts seizing the reins in a myriad of different ways to become a global leader, people like Romney and Michele Bachmann would be very alarmed.”
But alone among the Republican candidates, Bachmann has suggested the U.S. could learn some things from China.
“If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps,” she said at a recent debate. “If you look at China…they save for their own retirement security. They don’t have AFDC. They don’t have the modern welfare state. And China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with The Great Society, and they’d be gone.”

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