What's Wrong With World Trade
So the WTO is investigating whether the US shutting down gambling web sites violates international trade law.
Yet no international trade laws stop China from censoring its citizens access to Internet information on trade unions or human rights organizations that might help workers there demand better wages.
When offshore gambling corporations have standing to challenge Internet restrictions and workers in slave labor camps don't, the law is an ass.
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Comments (15)
It's all about the Benjamins.
The great invisible hand must not be hindered!
Hypocrisy? What hypocrisy? :-)
July 20, 2006 5:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Heck, it's even worse than that. It doesn't even make sense from a plutocratic perspective--China is apparently perfectly free to block search engines making tens of billions in revenue.
July 20, 2006 7:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
So? I don't see the interested plutocrats -- Google, Yahoo, etc. -- lining up at the courthouse door. Wonder why.
July 20, 2006 7:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Internet gambling websites are controlled by foreign companies, typically, so they do not help American corporations or Washington lobbyists much. China's exploitive policies help American corporations much. As an aside, corporations don't need democracy to be healthy -- we need to look no further than China to see evidence of that. And Germany's and Italy's corporations thrived quite handsomely under certain non-democractic governments in the 30's and 40's, if you recall.
Corporatism-as-government (AKA fascism) is a good thing, if you are closely connected to the big money.
July 20, 2006 8:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Heck, heck its even worser than that. China is not blocking search engines, China is getting search engine operators to self-censor along lines laid down by the Chinese Government.
For Yahoo and Google all this means is blocking people from pages that probably are not generating much ad revenue anyway (you would have to be a pretty stupid Chinese entrepreneur to be asking for placement on an anti-government page). As long as their overall page views don't drop they are not losing a dime and may actually be tucking a couple of extra yuan away in the process.
July 20, 2006 9:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hey, it's one dollar one vote. The on-line casinos have plenty of votes. Chinese workers, not so many. </snark>
July 20, 2006 9:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you're confusing the WTO with an entity that gives a rip about democracy, freedom, unions or workers. The WTO represents corporations. And as far as corporations are concerned, democracy and even the so-called "free market" are quite optional. In fact, the idea of a "free market" was originally a liberal idea, one opposed by conservatives.
China has lots of cheap labor and if that remains unchanged, I can't imagine any corporations complaining.
July 20, 2006 10:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Adam Przeworski has shown that democracies with per capita GDPs of $6,000 or more are far more likely to stay democracies. China's GDP per capita is $1,703. If we care about promoting democracy, human rights, and labor rights in China, we should engage economically until the country reaches that threshold, then start putting pressure on them.
July 20, 2006 10:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Let us first stop working under the assumption that the fault here lies with the WTO. An international organization is only as good as its members, and as you'll note from the NY Times article, any member can ask the WTO to investigate whether or not another member is violating the law. This is not some issue that we should expect Pascal Lamy to get up in arms about. Neither does the US need to play a particular role here. Censorship of the web does, after all, affect everyone (though given the prominance of the American technology firms involved, the US government is perhaps in a better position to do something than most).
So what is wrong with world trade? In this case, absolutely nothing. The mechanism for dealing with China is in place. We simply need someone with the political will to step up and start the process.
July 20, 2006 10:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you may be mixing cause and effect here. I haven't read the book, but the description says, "Economic development does not generate democracies, but democracies are much more likely to survive in wealthy societies." Human rights issues won't magically go away just because people are richer. Indeed, one could argue that it is democracy that leads to greater economic welfare. Waiting for China's per capita income to reach $6,000 may well mean waiting forever.
July 20, 2006 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is just wrong. There is something wrong with the WTO, the fact that it allows for the laws of a nation to be overturned because a secret panel says so. There is no oversight of the decision, no possible review of the decision, and the parties to the case have no choice about who is on the panel. Any member can ask for an investigation, but unelected 'experts', who normally turn out to be people from the industry which is being restricted get to decide whether to investigate and what the outcome of the investigation will be. These are structural features of the WTO so it does not matter who the parties are. So long as they are parties to the WTO they accept this framework for decision making.
And as Newman clearly states, what is being blocked is political content, not advertising, so there is no significant trade issue involved, so the WTO is not going to do a damn thing, and is not empowered to do a damn thing about the censorship of human rights groups.
July 20, 2006 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'll concede that the WTO process is unnecessarily (perhaps even outrageously) opaque, but note that I did not say nothing was wrong with the WTO. I said nothing was wrong with world trade (which, if you'll read carefully, is the question posed in the title, content of Newman's post aside) in this particular case. As for the notion the WTO can "overturn" a nation's law -- well, nonsense. The WTO can give permission for one nation to impose a penalty on another if the offending nation's laws are found to violate what is fundamentally an international agreement, but nothing says that the nation in question must change said law. It could also simply choose to pay (as many nations have done).
And yes, of course, the burden of paying falls far more heavily on the poorer nations. I'll be the first to say the system is far from ideal. Not ideal, however, is not the same as broken, and it is worth mentioning that most trade disputes brought up before the WTO are between wealthy nations.
As for whether or not the WTO has any weight on this issue, I think there's room to argue that it does. But if in fact it doesn't, then simply put this is not a trade issue -- and by extension the comparison of China's web-blocking ways to America's shutting down of gambling sites is nonsensical. Call this a human right's issue, perhaps, but leave the WTO out of it.
July 20, 2006 1:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have no opinion one way or the other about internet gambling, probably out of laziness. But much as I'd love to ensure a kid-friendly TPM Cafe, there's something unconvincing logically about the post. Yes, it's hypocritical to challenge Internet restrictions in one sphere but not in another. But then wouldn't that make the post's outrage at the WTO decision hypocritical?
Besides, there's a lot of reason to push for human rights in China that go beyond this aspect. And one can even imagine a backer of free trade to insist that we in the West should adhere to the principle of open access, but that challenging China is different and even that free trade encourages progress in China toward political openness. I can, after all, scream at illegal searches by Bush even though I know China conducts them.
I have qualms about these arguments, which is why I'm not a supporter of the WTO. However, I sense special pleading here: maybe be pointing to a cause we can all agree on, a totalitarian state, one can sneak in outrage at gambling. Hmm....
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
July 20, 2006 1:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
The WTO can direct a country to change its laws. The country can refuse and is then subject to fines. How is that different from any other law enforcement? I can speed all I want if I'm willing to pay the tickets. Saying the WTO cannot compel nations to change their laws is like saying the government cannot compel me to obey the traffic laws. It's true in a sense, but the government can impose penalties and such constitute coercion. Of course, the government can also incarcerate me, but that is not a concept applicable to nations in any direct sense. So the WTO functions as a meta-government, a government with power over other governments. I see no reason why anyone with a commitment to democracy should tolerate this.
July 21, 2006 8:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
China is not blocking search engines, China is getting search engine operators to self-censor along lines laid down by the Chinese Government.
And they do that by threatening to completely block the search engine.
July 23, 2006 9:49 AM | Reply | Permalink