Word: mfn
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President Bush, a former ambassador to China, was afraid of alienating this rising economic superpower. One of the last major votes in his presidency left China with its Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status. The press countered arguments for MFN status on a moral basis alone. Journalists cited the increasing reliance of Chinese exporters on the forced labor of prisoners. In Congress, a few legislators also showed concern for the welfare of the Chinese people; they complained that trade profits would be funneled into the military...
...China relations have been troubled since the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, but have grown markedly worse since last spring when China's most- favored-nation trading status came up for review in Washington. Though the Clinton Administration pushed through renewal of MFN status for a year, the decision was conditioned on significant improvements on the human-rights front. While Chinese citizens enjoy considerably more personal freedom today than they did three or four years ago, on-and-off repression of dissidence keeps the human-rights issue alive. Another major irritant was introduced last August when the U.S. imposed...
Largely in reaction to that craven and gratuitous behavior, Congress has generated a flurry of bills that would attach political conditions to China's most-favored-nation status. In fact, MFN is a misnomer: it implies special treatment but really means normal, equal treatment. All but a handful of the 187 countries on earth have MFN, including such pariahs and miscreants as Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya and Burma...
Over the years, Congress has tried to use the denial of MFN -- or what might more accurately be called the conferment of LFN (least-favored-nation) -- status as a stick to make countries behave. It has never worked. Instead the use of trade as a political weapon has almost always backfired. The classic example is also the original one: in the mid-1970s, congressional conservatives passed the famous Jackson-Vanik amendment, which withheld MFN from the U.S.S.R. until the Kremlin agreed to let more Soviet Jews emigrate. Just to show who was boss, Leonid Brezhnev decreased the number of exit...
...result, the butchers of Tiananmen still have MFN today, while the struggling reformers in the Kremlin don't. The solution to this absurdity is simple: the very concept of least-favored nation, which never worked well in practice anyway, is a relic of the cold war and should be junked...