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On 19 September, 2000, six weeks before the US election in which Al Gore lost to George W. Bush, and a year before 9/11, the senator from Delaware made a speech on the floor of the Senate in which he extolled the benefits of normalising trade relations with China ahead of admitting it to the World Trade Organisation.
As the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden wasn’t saying anything unusual or outlandish that day. A quarter of a century ago the consensus in Congress and beyond was that opening up China to more trade would automatically make the Communist country more democratic. Openness in the economic field would naturally lead to a nicer China.
The labor unions to which Biden was highly connected were unusual in warning of the impact on American jobs. Biden dismissed their concerns. The impact on the US economy of opening up to trade with China had been “oversold” in both directions, said Biden.
“I do not anticipate a dramatic explosion in American jobs, suddenly created to fuel a flood of exports to China. Nor do I see the collapse of the American manufacturing economy, as China, a nation with the impact on the world economy about the size of the Netherlands, suddenly becomes our major economic competitor.”
The Chinese had been forced to acknowledge the failure of communism and the superiority of an open market economy. Growing prosperity had put China on a path to ever greater political and economic freedom, he said.
Many others that day in the Senate in 2000 and elsewhere in the months and years that followed were equally enthusiastic about the prospects. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois said that China would soon be flooded with American technology: “It’s time to bring democracy to China via the internet.”
These exchanges open David J. Lynch’s blistering new book, The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalisation Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make it Right).
Lynch is an American veteran journalist who has reported from more than sixty countries in his career, on the way covering the rise and fall of the globalisation ideal. Although globalisation still exists, obviously, in that manufacturing is still dispersed, money still flows and trade still takes place, it is in retreat with President Trump conducting his tariff war, China and the US being locked in economic warfare, governments putting up trade barriers and fears spreading about supply chain resilience and over reliance on cheap Chinese imports.
Notoriously, the export of millions of manufacturing jobs from America to China, and elsewhere, helped create the conditions for voter anger and the ongoing meltdown in mainstream politics.
I’m not wholly convinced by Lynch’s prescription for dealing with the problem – the What Would Make it Right part of the subtitle. Publishers and modern book editors have a bad habit of forcing writers into concluding otherwise good books with a mini-manifesto, as though the reader needs the writer to come up with detailed policy proposals, rather than letting the story and analysis of what it means speak for themselves.
