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Clinton Expected to Sign China Trade Bill Thursday
President Clinton is expected to sign into law on Thursday a hotly contested bill to grant China permanent normal trade relations, achieving one of his last foreign-policy goals, administration sources said on Monday.
The legislation, overwhelmingly approved by the U.S. Senate on Sept. 19 and the House in May, will end a 20-year-old annual ritual of reviewing China's trade status and guarantees Chinese goods the same low-tariff access to the US market as products from nearly every other nation.
In exchange for the benefits, China agreed to open a wide range of markets from agriculture to telecommunications under the terms of a landmark agreement setting the stage for Beijing to join the World Trade Organization later this year.
The giving of permanent normal trade relations to China marks a turning point in relations between the world's richest nation and its most populous one. Comparisons have been drawn to President Richard Nixon's milestone 1972 visit to China and the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979.
The legislation will give US businesses unprecedented access to the vast Chinese market, potentially the world's largest with 1.3 billion consumers.
The White House said China's accession to the WTO would also benefit US national security as Beijing joined the global trading system and opened its markets and society to the West.
Labor unions fought unsuccessfully to defeat the trade bill, warning that the pact could cost hundreds of thousands of American workers their jobs as Chinese goods flooded the US market and companies moved factories to China to take advantage of lower wages.
The China bill was Clinton's biggest trade-policy victory since the passage in 1993 of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which tore down trade barriers separating the United States, Mexico and Canada. (Source: chinadaily.com.cn)
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