November 5, 1999
By Franz Schurmann
PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
It is now likely that China and Taiwan will be admitted to the World Trade Organization during its Seattle meeting set for November 30.
It is also essential. Without China the WTO will be a hollow shell and the big corporate to-do's — and the big protest demonstrations — now being planned will end up punching into thin air.
Western publics haven't yet grasped it, but international economists have seen for years that the world's industrial and financial center of gravity has shifted from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific. That's why one of the most important global economic meetings in decades is being held in Seattle, on the Pacific Rim, and not in Boston.
World Trade Organization has a "can-do" sound. But only a few years ago its role conjured up images of endless jaw-boning and bickering in sessions with names like the "Uruguay round" and the "Tokyo round."
In contrast, at this WTO meeting the future of corporate consumer capitalism, the economic ideology that rules the world, is at stake.
The Asian financial crises erupted in Thailand in July 1997, and then spread to Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and South Korea. But in October, speculators hit Hong Kong and were stopped dead in their tracks. China's use of its financial strength and political power gave Hong Kong victory. Japan was still locked into recession and could offer no help.
So the plague then spread, hitting two other huge countries, Russia and Brazil.
The Asian crises are now over and Japan is emerging from a recession that began in 1992 when its "real estate bubble" burst. The countries of East and Southeast Asia are growing again, which means they will export and import more — and much of what they import will consist of products central to American prosperity: high-tech goods and services, military weapons and agricultural products.
There are two billion people in East and Southeast Asia, some 600 million of whom are now middle-class. They are importers of high-tech and food products, and their governments, awash in cash, import weapons mostly made in the U.S.
No wonder the Clinton administration is so eager to have China in WTO.
And no wonder America's stock and bond markets are eagerly looking to Asia.
The Canadian economist and Nobel Prize winner Robert Mundrell warns of a weakening American economy a year or two ahead that could trigger a global recession. This will result in a flight from the dollar and even, conceivably, a return to a new gold standard. Since gold has always connoted the tightest of tight money policies, that recession could turn into a Great Depression dwarfing its predecessors.
Avoiding such a disaster is what WTO and the Seattle meeting are about.
Corporate capitalists now see global trade as the only way to avoid a worldwide depression. The old middle classes of the United States and Western Europe are not growing — in fact, they are shrinking while the generally poor immigrant populations are soaring.
The new, growing middle classes are in good part Asian, and Asia is where the profits of the early 21st century will be made. China is now fast becoming wired, a process that started in 1997. They will need lots of American technology, food and — eventually — weapons.
Strong anti-globalist movements have arisen in the U.S. and Western Europe on the left. Unions are fighting big layoffs caused by firms fleeing overseas. But anti-globalism is even bigger on the right, from Pat Buchanan in the U.S. to France's Jacques Le Pen and Austria's Joerg Haider.
Left and Right loathe each other but agree that globalism destroys jobs for native workers. But which is better? That some workers have no jobs in societies with otherwise low jobless rates, or that half or more of the work force are jobless in a new Great Depression.
Modern history gives an answer which those convening in Seattle would do well to ponder. Hitler, who headed a party called "National Socialist German Workers Party," or Nazi for short, decided when he came to power in January 1933 to prepare for war in order to bring about full employment for German workers. He got a lot of support — until German workers died like flies on the frozen Russian steppes.
Schurmann, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley and a voracious reader of foreign language press, is author of numerous books on foreign politics.
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