How Free Trade With China Politically Impoverished Both Countries

1. While we hoped freer trade with the West would lead China toward liberal democracy, the result has been an increasingly oppressive government.
2. While we hoped freer trade with the West would lead China toward liberal democracy, their oppressive government has only become stronger.
3. Bill Clinton, running in 1992 as a “New Democrat,” pulled his party from trade protection and silenced those who would take a principled stand on China’s human rights violations in order to prove he was not a pie-in-the-sky liberal like previous nominees Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.
4. Since the United States normalized trade relations with China in 2000 and agreed to let China join the World Trade Organization in 2001, we have been delaying the inevitable reckoning in much the same way.
5. With it comes not only economic upheaval but the realization that we have become so entangled in the communist sweatshop economy that we now lack the leverage to pressure China on human rights.
6. Both parties publicly committed to freer trade and friendship with communist China, and both were reluctant to pull back from that position, even as it became increasingly clear that things were not working out as planned.
7. The only difference is in our gentle treatment of them since the Cold War, which gives Red China the leverage to snub its nose at human rights while devouring our industrial economy.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/29/free-trade-china-politically-impoverished-countries/