How are jobs going to China without a Free Trade Agreement?

[Recursion]

If FTAs are the problem, rather than an attempt to partially address the problem, why do companies mostly offshore to countries without an FTA?

[elehhhhna]

1. Start here, 2004, President Clinton

PDF of This Issue PDF
Clinton Grants China MFN, Reversing Campaign Pledge

By Ann Devroy
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON
President Clinton Thursday reversed course on China and renewed its trade privileges despite what he said was Beijing's lack of significant progress on human rights.

Echoing the case made by George Bush when he was president, Clinton said he was convinced the Chinese would take more steps to improve human rights if the issue were separated from the threat of trade sanctions.

"This decision offers us the best opportunity to lay the basis for long-term sustainable progress on human rights and for the advancement of our other interests with China," he said at a news conference announcing his decision to extend China's most-favored-nation (MFN) trade status.

http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N27/china.27w.html

[Recursion]

3. Exactly. That's what happens with no FTA

China will never sign an FTA with us precisely because it lets us sanction them for labor abuses. NAFTA, TPP, et all are attempts to at least get us some leverage rather than the zero we have without them.

[elehhhhna]

4. Lol stop

[moose65]

5. Wait, I'm confused....

This happened in 2004 and President Clinton did it? Wow, he must be more powerful than I imagined, since he left office in 2001....

[Travis_0004]

12. 1994

[BlueStateLib]

11. China has been given MFN status every year since 1980, you mean PNTR

Congress agreed to permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status in year 2000 with veto proof majority 83 to only 15

[msongs]

2. because americans like cheap stuff from china more than jobs for americans? nt

[jtunes]

6. with MFN-China, perhaps?

signed by you know who (or perhaps you don't)

[Recursion]

7. The whole point of FTAs is to give us more leverage than MFN does

Do you not understand the difference?

[jtunes]

8. why give either, until protections against massive imbalances are included?

which none of these MFN's or trade agreements have done? all have lead to massive imbalances

[Recursion]

9. Because companies don't pay tariffs, consumers do

Same offshoring happens, with worse labor abuses, and the only difference is higher retail prices.

Actually taxing offshoring might do it, but I don't think anybody's found a way to make that work.

[elehhhhna]

17. Sure. And that's why prices went down on everything when company stopped paying tax etc.

Lol this place is starting to sound like free Republic

[pampango]

16. MFN was a step to China joining the WTO. It is right to have the largest country in the world

belong to the UN, the WTO, climate agreements, etc. Isolating/blockading China is no more a liberal policy than doing that to Cuba was.

China represents 1/4 of the world's people. Europe deals with China. So can we.

[grahamhgreen]

10. Google - PNTR:

‘PNTR’ Spells Job Loss in US, Recent Studies Say
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
“These studies strongly reinforce a conclusion that we came to in the late 1990s, which is that trade expansion with China, especially WTO entry, was mainly not about enabling U.S.-based manufacturers to supply China,” says Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business & Industrial Council Educational Foundation, a Washington research group.

Instead, he says, “It was to create the opportunity for U.S. companies to go to China and set up factories and labs and hire workers, at a much lower cost, in a much less regulated production environment, where substantial subsidies are available,” and then sell things back to the United States and the rest of the world.

Tonelson added: “Market access to China was never the priority; it was the pretext, and the pretext only.” He says the real supporter of the plan was multinational companies which fill the coffers of politicians’ electoral campaigns, and were keen to lower their costs of production by shifting manufacturing to China.

[Recursion]

13. Right. TFAs give us leverage that MFN doesn't

I feel like people are kind of perversely ignoring that obvious fact.

Free Trade Agreements are the bandage, not the wound.

[grahamhgreen]

14. I call them CTA's - Costly Trade Agreements.

[daleo]

15. The WTO is a sort of gigantic free trade deal

As an example of this: One Canadian province was stopped from favouring its solar panel industry, because China took it to the WTO.

In May 2013, Ontario Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli announced that the made-in-Ontario content requirements for wind and solar projects would be scrapped, after the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled that they were a violation of WTO regulations.[28][29]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Energy_Act_2009