[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[May 12, 2000]
[Pages 920-925]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Community in Shakopee, Minnesota
May 12, 2000

    Thank you. Well, first of all let me say I thank you all for coming 
out today. And I'm glad the weather made it easier on us.
    I want to thank Terry and Kitty and Gene Hauer for welcoming us 
to their farm. I think we ought to give them a big hand; we have invaded 
them--[applause]. We managed to find enough unplanted space that I don't 
think we're taking their income away, but we certainly have invaded them 
today.
    Dallas, thank you for your introduction 
and for your example. Secretary Glickman, thank 
you very much for the work you're doing, not only on this issue but on 
so many others to help the farmers of America. And I want to echo what 
you said about David Minge. He's a wonderful 
person. I've loved working with him these years I've been President. He 
is a straight shooter--although he never tells me any of those Norwegian 
jokes he's always telling Glickman--[laughter]--so I expect to get my 
quota before I leave.
    But you should know that he is an 
extraordinarily attentive Representative for you. I don't even know how 
many times he's mentioned some specific thing of importance to the 
people of this district and the people of Minnesota. But if everybody 
worked on me as hard as he has the last 7 years, I wouldn't get anything 
else done, because he really does a good job for you.

[[Page 921]]

    I want to acknowledge in the audience today the presence of your 
Lieutenant Governor, Mae Schunk; the attorney 
general, Mike Hatch; Treasurer Carol 
Johnson; your State ag commissioner, 
Gene Hugoson--I think that's the right 
pronunciation--and the mayor of Shakopee, Jon Brekke, and his wife and beautiful 
daughter came out to the airport and met me. 
And I have here, somewhere, a beautiful crayon drawing she made for me--
[laughter]--which I'm going to take back to the White House and save as 
a memory of coming here. It was really beautiful.
    I want to thank Bob Bergland, also, as 
Dan Glickman did. And I understand the former 
Governor of North Dakota, Alan Olson, is here. 
Welcome. I thank you for coming over.
    But I want to say a special word of appreciation to a man who's been 
my friend for 25 years and one of my favorite people in the whole world: 
our former Vice President, your former Senator, and my former Ambassador 
to Japan, Walter Mondale. Thank you for being 
here. Thank you so much. I spent most of my early life listening to him 
speak. I'm just trying to get even now. [Laughter]
    I also want you to know that I brought with me two representatives 
of American agriculture today when I came in on Air Force One, Scott 
Shearer with Farmland Industries, Nick 
Giordano of the National Pork Producers, and 
Susan Keith of the National Corn Growers, and 
they're out there working to help us. I thank them.
    I want to also say to the people who are here from New Ulm, I'm 
sorry that I couldn't come out to your community. I hope you'll give me 
a raincheck. What really happened was--you know, politicians always give 
you some sidewinding excuse. Well, I'll tell you what happened. What 
really happened is, I've got to go back to work in Washington tonight, 
and I have to get back there an hour and a half earlier than I had 
originally thought I had to be there. I'm glad I got to come to the 
Hauers' farm, and I hope I get to come back there.
    We have a community in my home State of Arkansas called Ulm. It's 
near Almyra, which is near Stuttgart--[laughter]--which is near Slovac. 
[Laughter] And they grow rice down there.
    I'm glad to be back in Minnesota. I was in St. Paul last week, at 
America's first charter school, on my education tour. And I'm coming 
back in a couple of weeks to speak at Carleton College. If I come 
anymore, you'll make me pay taxes here, but I've had a good time. 
[Laughter]
    I'd like to also acknowledge somebody who can't be here today, but 
somebody I really want to thank. Last week we had an astonishing event 
at the White House with President Carter and 
President Ford and virtually every living 
former Secretary of State, former Secretaries of Agriculture, former 
Trade Ambassadors, former Secretaries of Defense, National Security 
Advisers, two former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A whole 
history of the last 50 years in America was represented in the White 
House that day--except for Vice President Mondale's predecessor as 
Ambassador to Japan, Mike Mansfield, 
our former Senate majority leader; he's 98 years old now. When he was 
15, he lied about his age to get into World War I. [Laughter] He's from 
Montana, and he's about--he would give a speech about as short as the 
one Terry gave today. [Laughter] Sort of 
consonant with coming from the northern part of the United States.
    But when we swore Fritz in, Mike Mansfield came, and I said--you 
know, he was then, I think, 91 or 92--I said, ``You know, he walks 4 
miles a day.'' And Mansfield stood up in the back, and he said, 
``Five.'' [Laughter] So when he was 98 I said, ``Mike, are you still 
walking every day?'' He said, ``Yeah, but I'm down to 2 miles a day.'' 
So I figure if we could all walk 2 miles a day at 98, we'd be doing 
pretty well.
    I also want to thank your Governor, Jesse Ventura, who was there. He was the only sitting Governor who 
came. And he's been just great to support this initiative, and I'm 
grateful for him. It's good for you, and it's good for America. He's not 
a member of my party; he didn't have to do it, and it meant a lot to me 
that he showed up. I hope that it will mean something to you, too.
    When my staff was boning me up on getting ready to come here and 
briefing me about the history of this area, I learned that the first 
citizens of Shakopee--I'll get it right--were pioneers in more than one 
sense. Way back in the 19th century, they were already trading with 
China. China was then the biggest and richest fur market in the world, 
and many of the pelts they bought came from here, from the shores of the 
Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. They found markets in China.

[[Page 922]]

    Then trade was a small, though interesting part of your past. It's 
going to be a much bigger part of your future, one way or the other. 
That's why I wanted to come here to talk about expanding trade in China, 
what it means for farmers like you, for States like Minnesota, and, even 
more important than that, for the future of our children and America in 
this new century.
    In less than 2 weeks, Congress will vote on whether to provide 
permanent normal trading relation status with China. Now, PNTR, that's 
pretty arcane sounding. But what it means, as you've already heard, is 
that China will join about 130 other countries with whom we have trading 
that is governed by international rules of trade, plus whatever specific 
agreements we have with them.
    In 1979, when President Carter and Vice President Mondale and Bob 
Bergland were involved in opening our relationships with China, we 
signed a trade agreement. And ever since then--and 21 years, now, every 
year--we have granted them what used to be called most-favored-nation, 
but really was normal trading relations. We did it on an annual basis. 
And the idea behind doing it on an annual basis was, we knew we had big 
differences with the Chinese. They were a Communist country; we were a 
democracy. They had labor, human rights, and religious rights practices 
with which we did not agree. We were trying to continue to work with 
them to resolve their differences with Taiwan on a peaceful basis. And 
it was thought that the Congress reviewing this every year would give 
Congress--and through Congress, the President, whoever that happened to 
be--some way of reviewing where we were with China; whether it was in 
our larger national interests, as well as our economic interests, to 
review this every year.
    So now, I am proposing that we give them permanent normal trading 
status and let them come into the World Trading Organization, where 
they'll be governed by the same rules that govern us and all the other 
countries that are in it. And I came to tell you why I think we ought to 
make that change.
    The biggest benefit, as you have heard from Secretary 
Glickman, will probably go to the agricultural 
sector, in economic terms. One out of every three American acres grows 
exports. We are the world's largest exporter of agricultural products. 
During the last 5 years, in spite of the Asian financial collapse and 
the terrible thing it's done to farm prices, we've still seen our 
exports nearly double. If you look at gross cash receipts, trade means 
about twice as much to America's farmers as it does to the economy as a 
whole.
    Minnesota is third in soybean exports and production, fourth in 
corn--feed corn--seventh in overall agricultural exports. In 1998 
Minnesota sold $2.4 billion in agricultural products to foreign markets, 
$316 million to China--more than twice what you sold in 1993, when I 
became President.
    As Secretary Glickman described, the 
magnitude of the Chinese market virtually defies the imagination. There 
are 1.3 billion people in China. It's no wonder already China consumes 
more pork than any other nation. It is also the world's largest growth 
market for soybeans and soybean products. When I was Governor of 
Arkansas, back 15, 16 years ago, I used to go to Taiwan. And Taiwan was 
our biggest export market; they have 17 million people. And since the 
Chinese people are the same, if you extrapolate from 17 million to 1.3 
billion, it's almost incalculable what this could mean for soybeans. The 
dairy consumption in China is going up as people's incomes rise.
    Now, that's the way they are today, with a fairly modest per capita 
income. It is projected that over the next 30 to 50 years, China will 
have the biggest economy in the world. And obviously, as the people grow 
wealthier and move more and more to the city, the markets will grow, not 
only because more people will be able to buy food but the per capita 
food consumption will go up.
    What does it mean for China to go into the World Trade Organization? 
It means they won't subsidize their farm sector as they used to. They're 
already making adjustments--planting less wheat and less cotton, for 
example. There is no way the Chinese farmers can keep pace with the 
growth of their own consumers. But America's farmers can. And Congress 
can give you the chance to do so, but only if it votes for permanent 
normal trading relations. And I want you to understand why: because in 
order for the members of the World Trade Organization to let China in, 
and then to benefit from whatever trade concessions China makes--and 
they've made the most in their agreement with us--every one of the 
members has to agree to treat China like a member. So if we don't vote 
for permanent normal trading relations, it's

[[Page 923]]

like we're saying, well, they may be in there, but we're not going to 
treat them like a member. And if we don't do that, what it means is, we 
don't get the benefit of the deal I just described to you. That's what 
this is all about.
    This agreement, which we negotiated--and it's self-serving for me to 
say, I realize that, because it was negotiated by our Trade Ambassador, 
Charlene Barshefsky, with heavy input 
from Secretary Glickman and Gene 
Sperling, my National Economic Adviser, who 
was there in China with her--but it really is a hundred-to-nothing 
agreement economically. Normally, when we negotiate a trade agreement, 
we swap out, just like you do if you make a deal with somebody. Somebody 
says, you know, ``I'll give you this,'' and you say, ``Okay, I'll give 
you that.''
    This is not a trade agreement in that sense. This is a membership 
agreement. They say, ``If you let us into this world trading unit, we'll 
abide by the rules, including rules that we weren't governed by before. 
And, in order to get in it, we'll agree to modernize our economy, which 
means we will drop our tariffs, open our markets, let you sell into our 
markets, let you invest in our markets.'' It is a huge deal.
    If you look beyond agriculture, it used to be that if we wanted to 
sell manufacturing products in China, they'd say, ``Fine; put a plant 
here.'' Or if we wanted to sell some high-tech products, they'd say, 
``Fine; transfer the technology to us.'' Now--that's one reason we have 
representatives from 3M company here--we'll be able to sell for the 
first time into the Chinese market American cars, for example, without 
putting up auto plants, without transferring the technology.
    But nowhere will the benefits be greater than in agriculture. You've 
already heard from Dallas that export 
subsidies have kept American corn and other products from being priced 
competitively. No more. No more baseless health barriers, which China 
uses or has used to keep our beef and poultry outside their borders; no 
more high tariffs on feed grains, soybeans, vegetables, meat, and dairy 
products. Indeed--as Secretary Glickman reminds 
me from time to time when we have problems with our European neighbors 
and friends--the Chinese have offered us lower tariffs on some farm 
products than the European Union imposes today.
    Now, China's going to grow no matter what we do, and they're going 
to get into the WTO. The only issue here--the only issue is whether we 
are prepared to give up this annual review in return for the economic 
benefits that we have negotiated. That is the decision before the 
Congress, and it seems to me that it's a pretty easy decision. I think 
if Congress turns its back on this opportunity, we'll spend the next 20 
years regretting it. And I know we'll spend the next 20 years paying for 
it, in ways that go far beyond dollars in farm families' pockets.
    This is a vote for our economic security. China agrees to play by 
the same trading rules we do, and if we don't like it, we have two 
options. One is, we can pursue them in the world trading organization 
mechanisms, which means it won't just be America against China, and they 
won't be able to say, ``There are those big, ugly Americans trying to 
take advantage of us.'' It'll be us and everybody else who plays by the 
same rules.
    But in addition to that, you need to know that we negotiated an 
agreement with China unlike any one we have with any other country, 
which says that we can go against them bilaterally, us against them, if 
they dump products in our market, or if for some reason, like changing 
currency, there's an enormous surge of their products in our market 
threatening to dislocate a lot of Americans. And they have agreed to let 
us bring action with a lower standard for proof of injury than we have 
in our own trade laws. Plus which we have got money set aside to monitor 
this agreement in greater detail than any one we've ever had. So I think 
it's a pretty clear issue.
    Now, why isn't everybody for it? Well, some people say, ``Well, 
maybe they won't keep their word.'' Well, we have trade disputes all the 
time. We've got two outstanding with Europe still that haven't been 
resolved, where we just keep running around. But you've got a better 
chance of getting it resolved with people in a rules-based, law-abiding 
international system than outside it.
    Some people say, ``Well, they still do a lot of things we don't 
like.'' Well, that's true. But I can tell you that we'll have a lot more 
influence on Chinese foreign policy, when it comes to the proliferation 
of dangerous weapons, and on human rights and religious rights and 
political rights in China, if we have an open hand of working with them, 
than if we say no, if we turn our backs on them. I am absolutely certain 
of that.
    And I just want to point out, that is why all of our allies in Asia, 
the democracies--Japan,

[[Page 924]]

South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand--these countries want us to give 
them normal trading status. They're very worried that we might not do 
this and that it will increase tensions in Asia and increase the chance 
of something bad happening between Taiwan and Japan and make China focus 
more on military buildups than building their economy and their 
relationships with their neighbors. That's why the President-elect of 
Taiwan wants us to approve this.
    That's why Martin Lee, who's the leader of 
the democracy movement in Hong Kong--a man prohibited by law from even 
going to China--if anybody ought to have an axe to grind, you'd think he 
would. He came here to America to tell the Congress they had to vote for 
this because that was the way to get human rights and political freedom 
in China, to put them in a rule-based system of international law.

    Yesterday there was a detailed report in the Washington press 
interviewing dissidents in China, people who have been persecuted for 
their beliefs. Every one interviewed said, America has got to approve 
this, otherwise America will have no influence to try to keep moving 
China toward democracy and freedom.

    You know, we get frustrated, but China is an old country, and it's 
changing fast. Two years ago there were 2 million Internet users. Last 
year there were 9 million. This year there will be over 20 million. At 
some point, you tell me, when they get to 50 or 100 or 150 million--
which by then will still be barely more than 10 percent of their 
population--the country will change forever. You cannot maintain top-
down control.

    And I think it might be interesting for you to know that not 
everybody in China wants us to do this. You know who is against it in 
China? The most reactionary elements in the military and the people that 
run those old, uncompetitive state-owned industries that want to keep 
those subsidies coming, that want to keep these markets closed, and that 
want to keep their thumb on the little folks in China.

    Look, this may or may not work out. I can't tell you what the future 
will hold. Nobody knows that. And the Chinese will have to decide what 
path they take to the future. All I know is, this is a good economic 
deal, and it's an imperative national security issue, because we ought 
to at least get caught trying to give every chance to the Chinese to 
take a responsible path to tomorrow, to have a constructive relationship 
with this country when our children are grown, when our grandchildren 
are in school. We don't want a new arms race. We don't want every mutt 
in 2010 or 2020 to be calculating--see the papers full of stories about 
whether we're calculating whether we've got enough nuclear missiles 
against the Chinese.

    We ought to give this a chance. We ought to give the future a chance 
to work. It's a great deal for you now. But as much as I want to help 
the farmers here and the farmers home in Arkansas--so when I go home, 
they'll still let me come around--[laughter]--it's far more important to 
me to do the right thing by our national security, to give our children 
a chance to live in the most peaceful world in human history.

    And that's what this is all about. So I hope you will support David 
Minge. I hope you will ask your Senators to vote 
for this. I hope you will ask the other Members of the Minnesota 
delegation to vote for this. And I hope you will tell people that it is 
clearly the right thing to do economically. It is clearly the next 
logical step from the historic news made in the Carter/Mondale 
administration in 1979.

    But the most important thing is, it gives us a chance to build the 
future of our dreams for our children. People ask me all the time, ``Now 
that you've been President 7 years, what have you learned about foreign 
policy?'' And I always tell them, it's a lot more like real life than 
you think. And 9 times out of 10, you get a lot more reaching out a hand 
of cooperation than you do shaking a clenched fist. That's what this is 
about.

    Now, if they do something that's terrible that we're offended by, we 
don't give up a single right here to suspend our trade relations or do 
anything else that any emergency conditions might dictate. All we're 
doing is saying we'd like to build a future with you if you're willing 
to do it. And we're prepared to work over the long run.

    I thank you for coming here today. I ask you to recognize that this 
is not a foregone conclusion. I believe it is by far the most important 
national security vote that Congress will cast this year. And if you can 
do anything as

[[Page 925]]

an American citizen, as well as Minnesota farmers, to help us prevail, 
you'd be doing a great thing for our grandchildren.

    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:35 p.m. in the barnyard at the Hauer 
Farm. In his remarks, he referred to farmers Terry Hauer, his wife Kitty 
and father Gene; Dallas Bohnsack, chair, Scott County Board of 
Commissioners, who introduced the President; former Secretary of 
Agriculture Robert Bergland, member, University of Minnesota Board of 
Regents; Scott Shearer, director of national relations, Farmland 
Government Relations; Nick Giordano, international trade counsel, 
National Pork Producers Council; Susan Keith, senior director of public 
policy, National Corn Growers Association; President-elect Chen Shui-
bian of Taiwan; and Mayor Jon Brekke of Shakopee, MN, his wife, Barb, 
and their daughter, Maria.