Chapter Eight:
Economic Wars – Trade wars and the WTO
The problem from a Chinese national security standpoint was the extreme degree of dependency on foreign multinationals, especially American, for China’s spectacular economic growth. The economic miracle in China over the last 33 years was made possible by the rest of the world, and China has been only a small shareholder in it. Most of the profits have gone to multinational companies from the developed countries, especially the USA. Many products have been made in China, but not so many have been designed or created or invented in China.
Threats to the Workshop of the World
Powerful figures in America’s finance and banking corporations, in circles around David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, quietly prepared Richard Nixon’s China initiative in the early 1970’s, opening the doors for US corporations to turn China into what has become the “workshop of the world.” China has been skillful in capitalizing on its most valuable asset, its abundant human labor power in the process, to turn the country into the world’s second largest economy after the United States. This development, however, is not without certain risks.
In 2008, the EU surpassed the USA as China’s largest trade partner, with some $330 billion in bilateral trade. Japan was third, and those three accounted for nearly $1 trillion of China’s annual trade, about two-thirds of the total. That is a high degree of dependency on a small number of actors, all of them bound in military dependency on the United States or NATO. India, South Korea, and Australia are also major trading partners, and are the focus of Washington’s “pivot” strategy of militarily and economically isolating China.[284]
Walmart
The clearest example of China’s external dependency on a US corporate giant for trade and jobs is the relationship to one single US company, Walmart. The Arkansas-based retail chain has been the single largest U.S. importer of Chinese-made consumer goods, surpassing the trade volume of major countries, such as Germany and Russia.[285]
Sam Walton, founder of the Arkansas retail giant, was closely tied to the powerful elite US families who ran Wall Street. Walton’s financial banker for the phenomenal growth of Walmart was the Little Rock investment bank, Stephens & Co., founded by Jackson Stephens.[286]
Stephens Inc. is one of the biggest institutional shareholders in 30 large multinationals, including Walmart and another Arkansas-based company, Tyson Food, the world’s largest industrial chicken factory operation.
Jackson Stephens evidently built his career and fortune by being connected to the “right” people. He was a US Naval Academy classmate of Jimmy Carter, and used his connection to Carter during the Georgia bank scandals of President Carter’s Office of Management & Budget chief, Bert Lance. Stephens stepped in to bail Lance out of an extremely embarrassing financial debacle with National Bank of Georgia, Lance’s old bank. Stephens helped by introducing Lance to a Pakistani businessman, Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of a Luxembourg-registered, London-based bank called BCCI. In 1990, BCCI was convicted of money laundering for the Columbian cocaine cartels in Miami.[287]
In October, 1992, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released an 800-page report on the BCCI collapse. They called the BCCI scandal “the largest case of organized crime in history, spanning over some 72 nations,” adding that it represented an “international financial crime on a massive and global scale,” and that the bank “systematically bribed world leaders and political figures throughout the world.”
The Senate report concluded that among the provable charges against BCCI were “BCCI’s criminality, including fraud… involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas; BCCI’s bribery of officials in most of those locations; its support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; its management of prostitution; its commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; its illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.”
Jackson Stephens was no casual business acquaintance of BCCI’s Agha Hasan Abedi. In response to the concerns over Jackson Stephens’ involvement in BCCI, the Ohio Attorney General noted in a 1993 report, “Stephens’ name has been linked to securities violations that allegedly occurred when the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a foreign bank dominated by Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abedi, acquired stock and control over the Washington-based First American Bank.” In 1991, Stephens joined BCCI investor Mochtar Riady in buying BCCI’s former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators.
Indeed, in addition to Abedi, The Stephens Group was well-connected to another interesting Asian banking group, the billionaire Indonesian Riady family of Moktar and his son James Riady, who also owned the Lippo Bank in Indonesia. The Riadys were Chinese-Indonesian businessmen who moved in the 1970’s to Arkansas, of all places, despite holding billions of assets in Asia. Stephens and Riady became business friends, and soon Stephens and Riady bought a bank in Hong Kong. Stephens then invited Riady to invest in a Little Rock Arkansas bank called Worthen Bank. Another Jackson Stephens protégé was former Arkansas Governor and recipient of Stephens’ political funding, Bill Clinton.[288]
According to an exposé in the May 28, 2003 Wall Street Journal, a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton, then married to the new Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, was made a partner in 1977 in the house law firm of Stephens Inc, Rose Law Firm of Little Rock. In 1987, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Officials at investment giant Stephens Inc., including longtime Clinton friend, David Edwards, take steps to rescue Harken Energy, a struggling Texas oil company with George W. Bush on its board. Over the next three years, Mr. Edwards brings BCCI-linked investors and advisers into Harken deals. One of them, Abdullah Bakhsh, purchases $10 million in shares of Stephens-dominated Worthen Bank.[289]
Walmart in China
Deng Xiaoping had opened the People’s Republic of China to investment, easing restrictions on foreign businesses, and encouraging Chinese entrepreneurs to enter joint ventures with Westerners. Deng declared the fishing village of Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, as a “special economic zone,” with no taxes on foreign businesses for the first few years of operation. Across South China, the government began building roads, ports, and other infrastructure. In 1994, it devalued China’s currency, from roughly 5 to 8 yuan to the dollar, further fueling the country’s explosive development.
China, suddenly the cheapest workshop in Asia, attracted vast capital investment. Millions of migrant workers flooded industrial centers. Clever entrepreneurs migrated from Hong Kong and Taiwan, eager for a piece of the action. Many shut down their plants at home to set up new factories and hire mainland Chinese workers.
Shenzhen boomed. Growing at the rate of 20 percent a year, it became known as China’s “Miracle City.” In two decades, a fishing village mushroomed into a city of 7 million people, with high rises, miles of factories, and modern electronics headquarters. Here in Shenzhen, Walmart built its global sourcing headquarters.
David Glass, who succeeded Sam Walton as Walmart’s CEO in the early ‘90s, advised students to learn Mandarin Chinese. Glass told Walmart executives that if they didn’t think internationally, they were working for the wrong company. “The only reason [manufacturing] moved from Taiwan was China’s low level of wages,” said one early Walmart Hong Kong buyer.[290]
What allowed Walmart and other US and EU multinationals to dramatically increase their investment in production in China was the admittance of China into the newly-created World Trade Organization (WTO).
Luring China into the WTO
Bill Clinton, who promoted China’s WTO entry in 2000, said that allowing China WTO entry would be a great deal for America. It was certainly a great deal for Clinton’s Arkansas friend, Sam Walton, who became a billionaire in the process.
“We do nothing,” Clinton said about Chinese WTO membership. “They have to lower tariffs. They open up telecommunications for investment. They allow us to sell cars made in America in China at much lower tariffs. They allow us to put our own distributorships there. They allow us to put our own parts there. We don’t have to transfer technology or do joint manufacturing in China any more. This a hundred-to-nothing deal for America when it comes to the economic consequences.”[291]
A vital part of the long-term US hegemony strategy to maintain future control over an economically westernizing China was to make certain that China played “by the rules.” This would be guaranteed by luring China to accept membership into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which would write the “rules” of world trade to suit its American patrons. The WTO had formally opened its doors in Geneva in 1995. China formally joined in December 2001.
The price of entry into what has been called the “rich nations’ club” was high. China had to relax over 7,000 tariffs, quotas and other trade barriers. It uprooted Chinese farmers, owing to WTO sanctioned imports of soybeans and other products. On the surface, WTO membership opened China to huge capital investments by US and EU megacorporations, and it appeared China was the “winner.” In reality, China has provided staggering rates of profit to US and Western manufacturers in return for very little.
China is being forced to play by the “rules” of the WTO, rules dominated by the interest groups linked to Washington and Brussels.
The WTO headquarters were established in Geneva, Switzerland, a nominally neutral, scenic, and peaceful location. Behind this façade, however, the WTO was anything but peaceful or neutral. The WTO had been created as a policeman, a global free trade enforcer, and, as noted elsewhere in this work, a battering ram for the trillion- dollar annual world agribusiness trade, and for a US-directed globalization which benefited US corporate and financial interests uniquely. For that reason, the WTO was designed as a supranational entity, to be above the laws of nations, answerable to no public body beyond its own walls.[292]
Earlier GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) agreements had no enforceable sanctions or penalties for violating agreed trade rules. By contrast, the new WTO did have such punitive leverage. It had the power to levy heavy financial penalties or other sanctions on member countries found in violation of its rules. Founded in 1995, the WTO emerged as a weapon which could force open national protectionist trade barriers and force the proliferation of genetically modified crops, among other products.
The idea of a WTO, as with all major post-war free trade initiatives, came from Washington. It was the outcome of the GATT Uruguay Round of trade liberalization talks, which began in Punte del Este, Uruguay, in September 1986, and concluded in Marrakesh, Morocco, in April 1994. Ever since 1948 and the initial founding of the GATT, Washington had fiercely resisted including agriculture in world trade talks, fearing any common international rules would open US markets to foreign food imports and damage American agriculture’s competitiveness. Since the 1950’s, US agricultural export had been a strategic national priority, tied to Cold War geopolitics. Unlike all previous GATT trade rounds, the Uruguay Round made trade in agriculture a main priority, as well as a new category, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).
In terms of agriculture trade – a major vulnerability for China – WTO rules were drafted by US grain cartel members, especially Cargill, ADM and Monsanto, to benefit their long-term interests.[293] WTO rules for agribusiness trade were as a result dominated by a Group of Four, the so-called QUAD countries: the USA, Canada, Japan and the EU. The QUAD could meet behind closed doors and decide policy for all 134 nations. And within the QUAD, the US-led agribusiness giants – Cargill, ADM, Bunge – controlled major policy. In effect it was a consensus, but a consensus of private agribusiness that determined WTO policy.
The WTO Agreement on Agriculture – written by Cargill, ADM, DuPont, Nestlé, Unilever, Monsanto and other members of the US and EU agribusiness corporate cartel – was explicitly designed to allow the nullification of national laws and elimination of safeguards against the powerful pricing power of the agribusiness giants.[294]
Turning the WTO against China
As Washington and Wall Street saw it, once China had been “captured” in the globalized trade system established by Washington through the WTO, then China would inevitably begin to develop its own sizeable Chinese manufactures for export, and the WTO would be turned against China to keep her economically dependent as a satrapy of the American globalized system.
By 2011, Washington was increasingly using the WTO to escalate trade and economic pressure on the Peoples’ Republic. So long as China was the main outsourced cheap labor assembly site for US Fortune 500 globalized corporations, where the profits from Chinese work went to the mother companies such as KFC, Nike or Buick, the WTO was neutral. The minute China began to develop its own technology giants and patent its own inventions that competed with US rivals, Washington used the WTO as a weapon to police and penalize China, in a sophisticated new form of trade war in essence no different from the Opium Wars of the Dutch and British East India companies of the 1840s.
In early 2010, WTO Director General Pascal Lamy held a press conference to state that there would be increasing trade friction between the United States and China over everything from cars to chemicals.[295] The United States and China were engaged now in a series of trade battles over products as diverse as steel, poultry, patents and Hollywood films.
Google’s decision to pull out of China over “concerns about censorship and security” also was used by Washington to sour relations between the two countries.
In 2010, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened into what should have been no matter for the US Government. She demanded that the Chinese government answer Google’s allegations of interference, alleging China had committed “politically motivated censorship.”[296]
Google founder, Russian-born Sergey Brin, told the New York Times the company’s reason for leaving China: “Our objection is to those forces of totalitarianism,” referring in his remarks to his past in the Soviet Union. Brin was the son of professor parents who had lived for six years a privileged life under the Soviet system.
There was another agenda with Google, which the US government was intimately involved in. Clinton’s defense of Google against Chinese charges of possible covert spying on Chinese in China got a blow when a former US intelligence officer exposed the name of the CIA contact person who initially gave Google its seed money, and who is the CIA liaison to Google. In short, the Chinese government had every reason to distrust Google activities inside China.[297]
In late 2011, Claire Reade, the US trade official in charge of China affairs, said to Congress that restrictions and “interventionist policies” on issues such as intellectual property rights remain a “concern” for American companies operating in China. “Trade frictions with China can be traced to China’s pursuit of industrial policies that rely on trade-distorting actions to promote or protect China’s state-owned enterprises.” Translated into clear English, Reade accused China of pursuing a national economic agenda, not the globalization agenda being pushed in Washington to extend American global economic hegemony.[298]
The Solar Wars
One of the most significant trade war frictions between China and Washington involves a genuine Chinese breakthrough technology in building solar energy or photovoltaic systems far more effective and far cheaper than any Western company’s comparable product, including a US company that was personally tied to President Obama before it was forced into bankruptcy by the superior Chinese solar systems.
In May 2012, the US Department of Commerce issued a preliminary anti-dumping ruling against the three leading Chinese solar panel manufacturers.[299] Washington knew that China is in a difficult position to enact a trade counter-attack against the USA.
By July 2012, Washington had recruited the EU to join its attack on China’s solar exports. In the last three years, China has bankrupted leading US and EU solar companies simply by building a more advanced and far more inexpensive Chinese-patented alternative, and capturing 60% of the world solar market. The three leading Chinese solar companies under pressure from Washington were Suntech, Yingli and Trina. Their “crime” was that they had applied science to technology and come up with a superior, Chinese-owned product.
ACTA: New Trade Danger
In March 2010, documents were leaked on the Internet, exposing an extraordinary new level of Washington’s preemptive trade war, directed mainly against the Peoples’ Republic of China. It went by the name ACTA, short for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
The ACTA was a multinational treaty allegedly for the purpose of establishing international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement. The agreement’s sponsors in the US Trade Representative’s Office in Washington claimed it aimed to establish an international legal framework for targeting counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet, and would create a new governing body outside existing forums, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, or the United Nations.
In reality, as investigations by multiple governments and parliamentary bodies and other organizations revealed, ACTA was an attempted coup d’etat. It was a move to side-step even the WTO or other established international arbitration bodies, and create a false pretext for seizing Chinese or Indian or any other developing country’s products, even without verifiable proof of counterfeiting, if on a claim of “probable cause” to suspect.
The most revealing aspect of ACTA was the fact that its negotiators worked in complete secrecy, until an Internet leak of its secret protocols exposed Washington’s attempt to create a worldwide trade war coup d’etat. ACTA was a rogue agreement in terms of international law. ACTA was due to come into force in 2013, after ratification by only six countries. By October 2011, Washington had lined up some of its closest trade partners to sign, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. In 2012, Mexico, the European Union and 22 countries which are member states of the European Union signed as well. Mexico later withdrew and the European Parliament of the EU refused to approve or ratify the EU Commission’s decision to join.
When details of the treaty were leaked on the Internet, a hornet’s nest was stirred. According to Wikipedia,
Opponents say the convention adversely affects fundamental rights including freedom of expression and privacy. ACTA has also been criticized by Doctors Without Borders for endangering access to medicines in developing countries.[300]
ACTA was sponsored by the US-dominated pharmaceutical industry, US trade unions, and the Motion Picture Association of America. In addition to these lobbies, it later became known that a select handful of the most powerful US mega-corporations were privy to the secret talks drafting ACTA. The list included Google, eBay, Intel, Dell, News Corporation, Sony Pictures, Time Warner, and Verizon. All were given advance copies of the ACTA for comment, and sworn to secrecy. Other members of the advisory group to the US Trade Representative on ACTA were the US representative of the US-China Business Council; Walmart; Citigroup; Boeing Corporation; the GMO giants Monsanto, Dow Chemical and DuPont; US drug giants Eli Lilly, Abbott Labs, Merck & Co, and Johnson & Johnson. Also included were General Motors, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems; IBM; and the US Semiconductor Industry Association.
The secret negotiations excluded civil society groups, developing countries [including China and India], and the general public from the agreement’s negotiation process and it has been described as “policy laundering” by critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Entertainment Consumers Association.”[301]
The signature of the EU and many of its member states resulted in the resignation in protest of the European Parliament’s appointed chief investigator, rapporteur Kader Arif, as well as widespread protests across Europe. Anti-ACTA street demonstrations erupted across the EU.
In 2012, the newly-appointed rapporteur, British MEP David Martin, recommended against the treaty, stating: “The intended benefits of this international agreement are far outweighed by the potential threats to civil liberties.” On 4 July 2012, the European Parliament rejected the agreement in plenary session.[302]
In a remarkable indication of the massive pressure on the EU to ram through ACTA, despite the rejection of ACTA by an overwhelming majority of the European Parliament, EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht said in a speech that the Commission would nevertheless press ahead with the treaty should it fail to pass the European Parliament. De Gucht also indicated the treaty could be reintroduced at the next parliament in 2015 should it be rejected in the current one.[303]
Washington also indicated its contempt for Congress, which has the power under the Constitution to ratify treaty agreements. Reportedly the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) stated they will use the form of a “sole executive agreement” to implement ACTA, an unconstitutional process that bypasses Congressional approval entirely.[304]
When a citizens’ organization requested that the US Trade representative office provide a list of the US corporations which were given secret advance copies of ACTA for comment, the Obama Administration refused, stating that the documents were “information that is properly classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”[305] To invoke US government secrecy under the pretext of “national security” reminds one of the Cold War. It also suggests ACTA and the US corporate interests behind it are devising it as a weapon of economic warfare.
In March 2010, a leaked draft negotiation text showed that the European Commission had proposed language in ACTA to require criminal penalties for “inciting, aiding and abetting” certain offenses, including “at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting and copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale.”[306]
The vagueness of the language would allow an aggressive government such as Washington to fabricate any excuse to launch criminal action against, for example, Chinese solar companies. ACTA would lead to increased governmental interference in intellectual property rights issues.
It is suspicious that negotiations for the ACTA treaty were not conducted under the aegis of any international body. ACTA was first developed by the United States and Japan in 2006. Canada, the EU and Switzerland joined the preliminary talks. Official negotiations began in June 2008, with Australia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and Singapore joining the talks. The Senate of Mexico later voted unanimously to withdraw Mexico from ACTA negotiations.
ACTA: Criminalizing generic medicine
According to French European Parliament member Kader Arif, “The problem with ACTA is that, by focusing on the fight against violation of intellectual property rights in general, it treats a generic drug just as a counterfeited drug. This means the patent holder can stop the shipping of the drugs to a developing country, seize the cargo and even order the destruction of the drugs as a preventive measure.” He continued, “Generic medicines are not counterfeited medicines; they are not the fake version of a drug; they are a generic version of a drug, produced either because the patent on the original drug has expired, or because a country has to put in place public health policies,” he said.
A number of countries such as China, India and African nations have histories of seeking generic medicines – cheaper versions of expensive drugs for infections – something that has often been historically resisted by pharmaceutical companies. “There are international agreements, such as the TRIPS Agreement, which foresees this last possibility,” he said. “They’re particularly important for developing countries which cannot afford to pay for patented HIV drugs, for example.” Arif stated ACTA would limit the freedom of countries such as India [and China[307]] to determine their own medical choices.[308]
The non-governmental organization Médecins Sans Frontières has opposed ACTA, as part of their Access Campaign promoting the development and access to “life-saving and life-prolonging medicines.” In their report, A blank cheque for abuse: ACTA & its Impact on Access to Medicines, Médecins Sans Frontières concluded that ACTA had “fatal consequences on access to medicines,” that the agreement “does nothing to address the problem of poor quality and unsafe medicines,” and finally that ACTA “undermines existing international declarations to protect public health,” circumventing the Doha Declaration. Michael Gylling Nielsen, the executive of the Danish division of Médecins Sans Frontières, said in a statement to the media, “In the end, this is a question of life and death,” elaborating his point by mentioning the “possible consequences” of the treaty that “the hundreds of thousands of people who for example have HIV/AIDS not will get the treatment they need.”[309]
Similarly, the 2014 ebola outbreak will spread because Africa is denied access to new drugs.
TRIPS, the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement signed in 1994, requires a minimum level of observance of intellectual property rights by WTO members. Developing countries felt it was interpreted too strictly in favor of patent holders, and initiated negotiations leading to the Doha Declaration, which “reaffirmed flexibility of TRIPS member states in circumventing patent rights for better access to essential medicines.”[310] ACTA was an attempt to roll back TRIPS and make poor nations pay license fees on drugs even when generic versions were available.
Nate Anderson with Ars Technica pointed out that ACTA encourages service providers to collect and provide information about suspected infringers by giving them “safe harbor from certain legal threats.” Similarly, it provides for criminalization of copyright infringement on a commercial scale, granting law enforcement the powers to perform criminal investigation, arrests and pursue criminal citations or prosecution of suspects who are alleged to have infringed on copyright on a commercial scale. It also allows criminal investigations and invasive searches to be performed against individuals for whom there is no probable cause, and in that regard weakens the presumption of innocence and allows what would in the past have been considered unlawful searches.
Since ACTA is an international treaty, it is an example of policy laundering used to establish and implement legal changes. Policy laundering allows legal provisions to be pushed through via closed negotiations among private members of the executive bodies of the signatories. This method avoids use of public legislation and its judiciary oversight. Once ratified, companies belonging to non-members may be forced to follow the ACTA requirements, since they will otherwise fall out of the safe harbor protections. Also, the use of trade incentives and the like to persuade other nations to adopt treaties is a standard approach in international relationships. Additional signatories would have to accept ACTA’s terms without much scope for negotiation.
In June 2010, a conference was held at the Washington College of Law, attended by over 90 academics, practitioners and public interest organizations from six continents. Their conclusions were published on the American University Washington College of Law website. They found “that the terms of the publicly released draft of ACTA threaten numerous public interests, including every concern specifically disclaimed by negotiators.” Over 75 law professors signed a letter to President Obama demanding a host of changes to the agreement. The letter alleges that no meaningful transparency has been in evidence.[311]
While discussion of ACTA is less noticeable at present, the project is anything but dead. In fact, the Obama Administration has taken the key provisions of ACTA and secretly inserted them into the anti-China Trans-Pacific Partnership for creating a US-dominated Asia-Pacific Free Trade region that explicitly refuses entry to China.
Washington’s new TPP
The US Trade Representative has called TPP an “ambitious, next-generation, Asia-Pacific trade agreement that reflects US priorities and values.” President Obama, who announced the goal of creating TPP in November 2009, said that TPP will “boost our economies, lowering barriers to trade and investment, increasing exports, and creating more jobs for our people, which is my No. 1 priority.”[312]
Since that time all negotiations and content of the TPP have been kept secret, as with ACTA, by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR). TPP is an ominous project that bodes no good for China. It is an anti-China trade effort, a bid to co-opt earlier bilateral and multilateral regional Asian and Latin American trade agreements into a US-led anti-China economic coalition.
In May 2012, some 30 US legal scholars critical of the USTR’s “biased and closed” TPP negotiation process and proposed intellectual property-related provisions, publicly called upon USTR Ambassador Kirk to uphold democratic ideals by reversing the “dialing back” of stakeholder participation and to release negotiating texts for public scrutiny.
The law professors claimed that leaked documents show that the USTR was “pushing numerous standards that could require changes in current US statutory law,” and that the proposal was “manifestly unbalanced – it predominantly proposes increases in proprietor rights, with no effort to expand the limitations and exceptions to such rights that are needed in the US and abroad to serve the public interest.” The group claimed that the negotiations excluded stakeholders such as “consumers, libraries, students, health advocacy or patient groups, or others users of intellectual property,” and that it only offered “minimal representation of other affected businesses, such as generic drug manufacturers or Internet service providers.”[313]
The main point of TPP however is that the USTR in Washington is, according to leaked information, simply secretly inserting all the key provisions of the stalled ACTA and other trade schemes into the text of the TPP treaty. No members of the US Congress have even been informed. The second salient fact is that China was excluded by design from Obama’s TPP club. It is an attempt by Washington to control Asian trade to the detriment of China.
According to reports, the terms of the TPP membership will include “customs, cross-border services, telecommunications, government procurement, competition policy, and cooperation and capacity building,” as well as investment and financial services. Technically, TPP would only take effect in the ten negotiating countries: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam. Mexico joined recently, and Canada and Japan may soon follow. But in reality, it would affect citizens of China or any nations that interact with at least one of those ten.[314]
If the TPP is considered in the context of the currency wars, and the Pentagon’s “String of Pearls” military strategy against China’s oil trade routes, it becomes clear that Washington has moved step by step to create a web of control around China, attempting to cripple any independent Chinese sovereign development. The US-led Arab Spring destabilizations, and the attempt to bring Syria and then Iran into chaos, are integral parts of that strategy. China is Washington’s new “enemy image,” replacing Osama Bin Laden and the earlier enemy image of “Soviet Communism.”
[284] PRC General Administration of Customs, China’s Customs Statistics, Beijing, 2009.
[285] Sam Hornblower, “Walmart and China: A Joint Venture,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/secrets/wmchina.html
[286] F. William Engdahl, “Monsanto Buys ‘Terminator’ Seeds Company,” Global Research, Montreal, August 27, 2006, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3082.
[287] Ibid.
[288] Ibid.
[289] Ibid.
[290] Ibid.
[291] Richard A. McCormack, “China’s Entry Into The WTO 10 Years Later Is Not What President Clinton Promised,” Manufacturing & Technology News, June 15, 2010, Volume 17, No. 10, http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0615/WTO.html.
[292] Thierry Baudet, The Significance of Borders, Brill, Leiden, 2012, pp. 127-138.
[293] F. William Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, Global Research.ca, 2007, pp. 221-227.
[294] Ibid.
[295] Bradley S. Clapper, “WTO Chief: U.S.-China Trade Friction Rising,” January 21, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/22/wto-chief-us-china-trade_n_432620.html
[296] Hillary R. Clinton, “Statement on Google Operations in China,” US State Department, Washington DC, January 12, 2010, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135105.htm.
[297] Paul Joseph Watson, “Ex-Agent: CIA Seed Money Helped Launch Google. Steele goes further than before in detailing ties, names Google’s CIA liaison,” Prison Planet, December 6, 2006, http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2006/061206seedmoney.htm
[298]William McQuillen, “Chinese Distorting Policies Causing Trade Friction, U.S. Says,” Bloomberg, December 13, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-13/chinese-distorting-policies-causing-trade-friction-u-s-says.html.
[299] Global Times, “Show some bite in US solar trade frictions,” May 19, 2012, http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/710249/Show-some-bite-in-US-solar-trade-frictions.aspx
[300] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
[301] Ibid.
[302]Zack Whittaker, “‘Last rites’ for ACTA? Europe rejects antipiracy treaty,” CNet, July 4, 2012, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57466330-38/last-rites-for-acta-europe-rejects-antipiracy-treaty/.
[303] Ibid.
[304] Eddan Katz and Gwen Hinze, “The Impact of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement on the Knowledge Economy: The Accountability of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative for the Creation of IP Enforcement Norms through Executive Trade Agreements,” Yale Journal of International Law, November 2009.
[305] KEI, “White House says ACTA text a State Secret. EU parliament says time for more transparency,” March 12, 2009, http://keionline.org/blogs/2009/03/12/acta-state-secret
[306] Wikipedia, “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA),” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
[307] TechDirt, “Why The Chances of China Joining ACTA Or TPP Are Practically Zero,” http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120308/09284118036/why-chances-china-joining-acta-tpp-are-practically-zero.shtml
[308] Out-Law.com, “ACTA restricts developing economies, India tells WTO: Secret IP treaty not a sweetie,” June 15, 2010, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/15/acta_wto/
[309] Wikipedia, op. cit.
[310] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doha_Declaration
[311] Wikipedia, “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA),” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
[312] Slate.com: “The TPP is The Most Important Trade Agreement That We Know Nothing About,” https://openmedia.ca/blog/slatecom-tpp-most-important-trade-agreement-we-know-nothing-about
[313] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Kirk
[314] David S. Levine, “The Most Important Trade Agreement That We Know Nothing About: The Trans-Pacific Partnership could completely change intellectual property law. But the details are being kept secret,” July 30, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/07/trans_pacific_partnership_agreement_tpp_could_radically_alter_intellectual_property_law.single.html.