[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 7070]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



             CORPORATE INVESTMENT IN AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 
end of the Cold War opened up a 10-year flood of new trade investment 
and economic growth in the world. But underneath this trend lies an 
unsettling pattern.
  When it comes to competing for U.S. trade and private investment 
dollars, democratic countries in the developing world, countries like 
India and Taiwan and Bangladesh and South Korea, are losing ground to 
more authoritarian countries, like Indonesia, and especially the 
People's Republic of China.
  In the post-Cold War decade, the share of developing country exports 
to the U.S. for democratic nations fell from 53 percent in 1989 to 34 
percent in 1998, a decrease of 18 percentage points. Nondemocratic 
nations increased their share commensurately.
  In manufacturing goods, developing democracies' share of developing 
country exports fell 21 percentage points, from 56 percent to 35 
percent.
  Regarding U.S. foreign investment in manufacturing, developing 
democratic countries gained 1 percent over the last 10 years. Nations 
that do not support democracy gained 5 percent of U.S. foreign 
investment over the last 10 years. China was responsible for 5 percent 
of foreign investment gained for nondemocratic countries.
  Not only have the U.S. export market shares decreased for developing 
countries that have always been democracies, countries that have 
recently become democracies have also lost market share.
  Understanding that basis for the vote that is coming in the next 
couple of weeks about giving permanent trade, Most Favored Nations 
status trading privileges to China should make the difference in this 
vote.
  Western corporations want to invest in countries, like China, that 
have below-poverty wages, that have unenforced environmental laws or 
nonexistent environmental standards, and have no opportunities to 
unionize. As a result, they are turning to the authoritarian countries 
that can suppress labor rights and guarantee high profits for American 
companies.
  China, for instance, is much more attractive to an American 
investigator than is India; China, a country which has a docile 
hierarchal workforce where workers cannot join unions, where workers 
cannot talk back, where workers often cannot switch jobs and go to a 
competing factory.
  United States pretends to promote democratic ideals worldwide through 
foreign aid and through the rhetoric in this chamber. But as developing 
countries make progress towards democracy, the American business 
community rewards them by pulling its trade and investment and 
depositing their investments in money in other totalitarian countries.
  Understand, where corporate CEOs walk the halls of Congress asking 
Members of Congress to support permanent trade advantages for China, 
understand where they say that we need to engage with China so China 
improves its human rights record, where China will quit persecuting 
Christians and China will quit allowing forced abortions in their 
country, understand that the three major economic players in China are 
the Communist party of China, the People's Liberation Army of China, 
which runs many of the factories there, and Western investors.
  Those Western investors, the Communist party, the People's Liberation 
Army, none of them want to change the rules. The rules work just fine 
for them. They like an authoritarian government structure that does not 
reward an ability to organize and bargain collectively, that does not 
tolerate any kind of dissent, that does not allow for any kind of 
worker rights.
  That is why American investment is more and more likely to go to 
China instead of India, instead of Taiwan, instead of South Korea, 
instead of a country that really is a democracy. That is why China's 
permanent Most Favored Nations status trading privileges are such a bad 
idea.
  Shame on this country, shame on this Congress if we give permanent 
Most Favored Nations status trading privileges to a country that 
violates every human rights standard, every value that we in this 
country hold dear.

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