Word: mfn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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WASHINGTON -- After taking heat from human-rights groups for granting China MFN status, the U.S. is planning a low-key, go-slow approach to closer ties with VIETNAM. The new U.S. liaison office in Hanoi will quietly help firms seeking business but will not organize showy trade missions or trumpet Vietnam's economy as the next big Asian opportunity...
Second, the yearly threat to end MFN was having no effect on Beijing's leaders, who view even whispered rebukes as "unacceptable interference." As Clinton said last week, a proud Confucian culture that prizes order over liberty is especially reluctant to take steps perceived as kowtowing to U.S. pressure...
...tested by those who deride his new policy as "trickle-down liberty." Human rights, democracy and trade are "linked inseparably and indivisibly," declared House of Representatives majority leader Richard Gephardt. Clinton's reversal "will encourage China's intransigence," added Senate majority leader George Mitchell. Rather than fight to revoke MFN altogether, these influential Democrats will soon seek to broaden the category of penalized products to exclude from the U.S. about $900 million in goods produced by China's army and its commercial partners. With many in Congress eager to demonstrate their toughness, that proposal could attract majority support...
Human-rights organizations, however, are leaning hard on Clinton to be tough. They point to China's continued export of goods made with prison labor: under Clinton's own Executive Order, Beijing must stop that to retain MFN. Harry Wu, a former Chinese political prisoner, showed Congress tapes of prisoners at forced labor that he had secretly filmed on a five-week trip this year. Says Wu: "Fifty percent of Chinese rubber products come from chemical factories that employ forced labor." Human Rights Watch/Asia says latex gloves used by doctors were exported as recently as last January only after being...
...overturned by Congress, where opponents could not muster the two-thirds votes needed to override a presidential veto if legislators forced a showdown. But Clinton will take a political roasting no matter what he does. Administration officials say he has come to see the wisdom of extending MFN and delinking it from human rights, which he could promote better by diplomatic means. But politically he cannot afford to take such a forthright stand yet. Instead, the President seems to be aiming for the now familiar sort of compromise that pleases no one and accomplishes little...