Word: mfn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tariffs. China is the only one of the 191 most favored nations whose status is renewed each year by a vote in Congress. That ensures a humiliating annual review on Capitol Hill of how Beijing punishes dissidents, suppresses Tibet and sells missiles to rogue states. Along with winning permanent MFN status, China wants to be admitted to the World Trade Organization, a goal the U.S. and other nations are obstructing until China lowers trade barriers...
Ironically, the world's last communist power largely relies on the FORTUNE 500 to advance its economic agenda. Whenever Congress considers China's MFN status, such companies as Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Intel, General Motors and IBM lobby on China's side. For Boeing, the stakes could not be higher: Beijing is expected to spend $124 billion on new planes over the next 20 years, making it the world's fastest-growing airline market. "When the U.S.-China relationship goes in the tank, so do our order books," says Boeing spokesman Thomas Tripp...
...politics, criticizing the political establishment for being hypocritical is almost trite. In the case of the Clinton administration's contradictory trade policies with Cuba and China, however, the charge of hypocrisy is warranted. While both countries are guilty of flagrant human rights violations, the prized "Most Favored Nation" (MFN) trade status has been bestowed upon the far more culpable Chinese...
Clinton overturned former president Bush's China policy to grant a nation guilty of flagrant human rights violations MFN trade status. Even if this can be excused as an attempt to introduce the Chinese to capitalism (and thereby, inevitably to coerce the fall of one of the lasting bulwarks of communism), it must still be recognized as an abandonment of the principles which Americans hold dear. Our attempt to create a "favorable investment climate" in China by "exporting democratic values" may be an effective tool for bringing China's relationship with communism to an end, but at what ideological price...
...point out, for example, that the U.S. is by far the world's largest seller of armaments and is about to begin delivering 150 F-16 fighters to Taiwan, which Beijing considers a province of China. Last week the Chinese even had mixed feelings about Clinton's extension of MFN. "Clinton has made a wise decision," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Cui Tiankai, but he added that the Chinese dislike having this issue up for consideration every year. "We hope the U.S. side will reverse this erroneous practice," he said...