By ALEXA OLESEN
(Virtual China News, May 17) The campaign to win Congressional votes for permanent normal trade relations status for China has brought together a host of strange bedfellows over the past six months.
Jesse Ventura and Reverend Billy Graham's son, Ned Graham, both testified in the Senate, bringing their different rhetorical styles and ideologies in support of the very same cause.
Ex-U.S. Ambassador to China Leonard Woodcock and ex-Communist party member Sidney Rittenberg stepped forward to artfully distill the complicated argument for why PNTR for China is the right choice into pithy sound bites.
Even the often dour U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky waxed poetic over the issue. In a speech before a group of graduating West Point cadets she quoted the (340-278 BC) century Chinese poet Qu Yuan.
One of the most unexpected advocates for PNTR is Sidney Rittenberg, the only American to ever be an official member of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao himself approved Rittenberg for the Party in the early days of the revolution. Mao also later threw him in prison when he decided Rittenberg was a spy.
In total Rittenberg spent 34 years in China and 16 of those in jail. These days he and his wife Yulin Rittenberg and their son run Rittenberg Associates, a consulting company that helps American businesses succeed in China. Now, he says, it's the free market he espouses rather than the Little Red Book.
"The goals that led me to Communism in the first place havent changed at all, such as working to eliminate poverty, oppression, racial inequality, and working for a world with no more wars," Rittenberg said in a phone interview from his Washington state home. "That has not changed. Economic progress is one of the keys to making those changes."
A sampling of pro-PNTR voices:
"Leonard Woodcock, a former president of the United Auto Workers, has earned his stripes in the American labor movement. Now age 89, however, he has parted ways with American labor leaders and is urging Congress to grant China permanent normal trade relations, and to support China's entry to the World Trade Organization.
"In my lifetime [in the United States], women were not allowed the vote and labor was not allowed to organize," said Woodcock, who also served as the U.S. Ambassador to China from 1979 to 1981. "In my lifetime, although law did not permit lynching, it was protected and carried out by legal officeholders. As time passed, we made progress, and I doubt if lectures or threats from foreigners would have moved things faster." (from the Washington Post)
Sidney Rittenberg is one of the only Americans, living or dead, who has personally known every Chinese leader from Mao Zedong to the current President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji. His book "The Man Who Stayed Behind" details his extraordinary experiences in China, which included 16 years in prison on charges of spying. Rittenberg is now a consultant to American companies that want to do business in China.
"China is not a weird place impossible to understand. The people who indulge in indiscriminate China bashing, and claim to do it out of concern for our security, are barking up the wrong tree."
Remarks by Secretary of Commerce William M. Daley at Catholic University Washington, DC February 3, 2000
"I have a famous quote of Teddy Roosevelt framed in my office. It's the quote where he says 'it's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.'
We may take our hits. We may stumble. But we will be in the arena. This thing is winnable. It is absolutely doable. And I know that your generation, and those who are your age in China, will be far better off as a result."
Governor Jesse Ventura WTO and Permanent Normal Trading Relations for China Committee on Ways and Means March 30, 2000
"I'm no trade expert, I don't speak Chinese and I've never negotiated an international trade deal. They didn't offer international trade relations at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis."
"What I do bring to you today is a dose of common sense. China's participation in the WTO and permanent normal trade relations between China and the United States is the number one marketing opportunity of the 21st Century, and it's being handed to us on a silver platter."
U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky Speaking on "Trade and American National Security: The Case of China's WTO Accession" at the United States Military Academy West Point, NY April 12, 2000
"Today, as we all know, our relationship with China is free neither of deep-seated policy disagreements nor moments of tension.
These are perhaps natural: we are great Pacific powers, and our governments reflect vastly different political systems and values. But to quote the classical Chinese poet Qu Yuan, writing in the 4th century B.C., such a relationship poses profound questions for future peace and stability across a vast section of the earth:
'Eagles do not flock like birds of lesser wing;
How is the round to fit with the square?
How can different ways of life be reconciled?'"
Testimony of Nelson E. Graham President East Gates International
Before the Senate Committee on Finance March 23, 2000 US-China Trade Relations and the Impact on Religious Activity in the PRC
"We have been able to legally distribute over two and one-half million Bibles (both Catholic and Protestant) to non-registered, religious practitioners since 1992. We have also been able to publish and distribute biographical, historical and cultural religious literature. For example, we recently signed a letter of agreement to publish a compilation of 160 of my father, Dr. Billy Graham's, sermons. In addition, we are also involved in religious training programs in both the registered and unregistered religious communities.
"I believe that granting China PNTR and China's succession into the WTO will only encourage China's continued engagement with the global village, increase the availability of information exchange technology to its citizens, accelerate its development of the rule of law and allow for increased contact between U.S. and Chinese citizens and will ultimately lead to positive changes in China's implementation of its religious policy. This will inevitably serve to benefit China's religious practitioners and the Western organizations seeking to serve them."
National Conference of Black Mayors, Inc.
Resolution #10 Support Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China
April 28, 2000
"To compete effectively with their counterparts throughout the world, American companies' farmers and workers need to be able to import, export and distribute goods in China. This new agreement will allow them to do so directly from the U.S. and to have their own distribution facilities in China rather than being forced to set up factories in China, and will give U.S. companies access to fast-growing new industries in telecommunications in China."
Members of the Western Governors' Association adopted a policy resolution on April 10, 2000 supporting the trade measure, after careful consideration following the Taiwanese presidential election. The Western Governors' Association is an independent, nonprofit organization representing the governors of 18 states, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.
Alan Larson, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs Remarks,World Affairs Council Executive Luncheon
San Francisco, CA, March 29, 2000
"Luckily, Californians like you understand the benefits of being engaged with the world. Simply consider how many languages are heard in your streets. It's no coincidence that our most diverse state is also our most creative state and the country's leading exporter.
No state has been engaged longer or more intensively with China than California. Fully 48% of the passengers in the U.S.-China aviation market are concentrated in California. I mention aviation because transportation and communications are respectively the circulatory and nervous systems of the global economy."
Statement of Leon Trammell, Chairman and Founder, Tramco, Incorporated, Wichita, Kansas, and, Member, International Policy Committee, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Testimony Before the House Committee on Ways and Means Hearing on U.S.-Bilateral Trade Agreement and the Accession of China to the World Trade Organization February 16, 2000
"I am Leon Trammell, Chairman and founder of Tramco, Incorporated of Wichita, Kansas. We are a 33-year old company employing 160 workers in Kansas, where we design, manufacture and sell conveying equipment. You can find our conveyors loading trains with grain in the American Midwest, transporting cement in Morocco or moving wood chips in a particle-board plant in Canada. During the last decade, we entered a new market with high growth potential for us -- China."
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