With 1.3 billion people, China is a large market for U.S. products, even if few corporations have made much money there yet. Greed has already produced a frantic corporate courtship of China, a juggernaut of business pressure on Congress and specious arguments that trade leads to democracy and peace. What proponents don't discuss is that China is the world's biggest pool of cheap labor. Worse, a large percentage of Chinese manufacturing is controlled by the army, the so-called People's Liberation Army. The army even has dozens of companies in the U.S. importing Chinese goods on a large scale to earn dollars for military weapons.
Some manufacturing takes place in guarded camps.
Obviously, these are not practices that could survive serious annual human-rights checkups. But such rights never seemed to matter in China, where 3,000 years of history show no concept of individual rights or freedom of expression, though the Chinese invented paper and printing. What does recur in Chinese history is ambition for preeminence, ethnocentricity and hostility toward foreigners that turns into xenophobia. If the advent of radio in the 1920s and '30s did not bring stable democracy and human rights to an embattled, suspicious Germany, it is unwise to assume great things from the Internet in China. But even if U.S. politicians can shrug off the fate of workers and rights in China, they cannot shrug off the fate of U.S. workers.