Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic and/or diplomatic engagement with the People’s Republic of China


NC Currency Manipulation Pressure CP



Download 2.62 Mb.
Page125/144
Date18.10.2016
Size2.62 Mb.
#2905
1   ...   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   ...   144

1NC Currency Manipulation Pressure CP

Counterplan Text: The United States Federal Government should pressure China to end the manipulation of their currency




  1. Solvency: The counterplan solves better than the affirmative- China will only listen to concrete threats



Council on Foreign Relations, 2013 [Large, international relations journal, “Confronting U.S.-China Economic Imbalances”, November 2, http://www.cfr.org/china/confronting-us-china-economic-imbalances/p20758#p3]
In August 2011, credit rating agency Standard and Poor's downgraded U.S. debt by one notch for the first time in history, igniting a debate over whether U.S. treasuries will still remain the safest asset in the world. Following the unprecedented move, China sold $36.5 billion in U.S. treasuries, bringing it to $1.137 trillion, its lowest level in a year. Still, experts say there are few other choices besides the United States in which China can safely invest its large foreign reserve holdings. "The alternatives," says Carnegie's Dadush, "are European government bonds and Japanese government bonds, neither of which are very appetizing." U.S. Policy Implications Many U.S. policymakers have called for China to wean itself off export dependence and build up domestic consumption to correct the "global imbalances" that drew so many U.S. dollars to China in the first place. The Obama administration and G20 leaders, including Chinese President Hu Jintao, pledged at September 2009's Pittsburgh summit (PDF) to develop a program to address these imbalances and undertake "monetary policies consistent with price stability in the context of market-oriented exchange rates." In addition to the recent U.S. Senate legislation targeting China, U.S. congressional leaders have also proposed ways to act against China through international bodies, including the International Monetary Fund and the WTO. "The IMF has never labeled a country a currency manipulator, but it's something they need to think about, because if there's no pressure, there's no change," says Dunaway, a former IMF official on Asia. He says China returned to a largely fixed exchange rate in 2008 in part because "the issue dropped off the agenda" globally. Other experts question the efficacy of appeals to international institutions. In a December 2008 paper (PDF), Stanford University's Robert Staiger and Alan Sykes write that proving China's violation of WTO commitments vis-à-vis its currency policies would be difficult. They dispute the notion that currency devaluation alters trade balances in the long run.

2NC/1NR Currency Manipulation Solvency Extensions

  1. Economic engagement with China in the WTO is ineffective. The US must confront China



Navarro, 2012 Peter Navarro is a professor at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California-Irvine. “China’s Currency Manipulation: A Policy Debate” September/October http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/china%E2%80%99s-currency-manipulation-policy-debate
One obvious result is a US debt to China, now approaching three trillion dollars. This debt has exposed the US to significant political pressure. China’s fixed peg also makes it impossible for the US to ever balance its trade through the normal kind of currency adjustments that are the hallmark of mutually beneficial free and fair trade. Patrick Mulloy, of the US-China Commission, observes: “It’s like having a tariff on goods coming from the United States of forty or fifty percent by the amount that they’re underpricing their currency. It also gives their exports to the United States a subsidy of forty or fifty percent to capture our market and knock out domestic industries that might be competing with them.” Still a third major weapon of job destruction wielded by China’s largely state-owned enterprises is that of blatant counterfeiting and piracy. As economist Ian Fletcher explains, it’s not just about pirating Hollywood movies anymore: “What’s more important is the theft of the blueprints for high technologies. I hear all the time about American companies who find themselves competing in the marketplace with a Chinese product, and they take it apart, and they find themselves looking in the mirror because the Chinese have just stolen the plans of their own product.” Of course, when a Chinese enterprise steals intellectual property that an American rival had to pay significant R&D monies to discover and develop, that Chinese enterprise gains an additional production cost edge—as much as fifteen to thirty percent in R&D-intensive industries like automobiles and pharmaceuticals. Rounding out China’s mercantilist advantages are some of the laxest environmental and worker health and safety standards in the world. “If a company like Bao Steel in China is allowed to dump pollution into the Yangtze River when, say, a US steel company is not allowed to do the same in the Ohio River,” says Fletcher, “that’s going to be a source of competitive advantage for the Chinese because pollution control costs money.” China is also a country where, as Congressman Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, laments, “You go to prison if you try to form a labor union.” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka echoes this complaint: “They don’t comply with their own child labor laws, prison labor laws, health and safety laws, minimum wage laws.” Within this context, says former Canadian MP and Nobel Peace Prize nominee David Kilgour, every American consumer should be asking this question on their way to the checkout line: “How can Walmart, or anyone else in the United States, allow production facilities in China to sell garments, chopsticks, Christmas decorations that are made in forced labor camps?” China’s unfair trade practices have indeed taken a very heavy toll on the American economy. Consider that for the second half of the twentieth century, the US gross domestic product grew at a healthy rate of about 3.5 percent annually. Since China joined the WTO in 2001, however, that rate has fallen to an average of only 1.6 percent. While the loss of almost two percentage points of GDP growth a year may not seem like much, it translates into a failure to create two million jobs a year and cumulatively more than twenty million jobs lost to slow growth since 2001. Not coincidentally, that’s almost the exact number of jobs America now needs to get its people fully back to work. These startling statistics raise two questions: Why do our political leaders in the United States put up with China’s unfair trade practices; and why haven’t our politicians realized, as businessman and philanthropist Leo Hindery has frequently observed, that “the best jobs program” is not more fiscal stimulus or easy money from the Federal Reserve but rather “trade reform with China.” At least one reason is that America’s biggest multinational companies, like Apple, Boeing, Caterpillar, and GE, are now benefitting from off-shoring their manufacturing to China. As think tank analyst Alan Tonelson notes: “We can never forget that when China manipulates currency, when China provides illegal subsidies of all sorts—for manufacturing, for the act of exporting itself—these US-owned companies benefit. They like the status quo, they want to protect it, and they have paid a lot of [lobbying] money for it.” As bad as America’s economic engagement with China has been for American workers, it’s been even worse for China’s huddled masses. As the economist Ian Fletcher has pointed out, “Economic growth in China has not led to its becoming more democratic. It has led to a more sophisticated, better-financed form of authoritarianism.” Manufacturing & Technology News editor Richard McCormack adds that China is “less free today than it was when they entered the WTO.” And yet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remains adamant in her posture that human rights and trade with China should not be linked. What is to be done in the face of the severe consequences of America’s economic engagement with China? Perhaps we should take a page out of Ronald Reagan’s playbook; he believed that even though we might want to “trust” the Soviet Union to abide by treaties we should also “verify.” By analogy, the White House and Congress may want to continue to engage Beijing on economic issues, but for a number of reasons—including China’s blatantly unfair trade practices, its horrific human rights abuses, and its aggressive military buildup that increasingly threatens our friends and allies in the Pacific—a confrontation is long overdue.


Download 2.62 Mb.

Share with your friends:
1   ...   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   ...   144



The database is protected by copyright ©ininet.org 2024
send message
    Main page
Guide
Instructions
Report
Request
Review