Two of America's leading newspapers ran important stories on China last week. The Wall Street Journal's Helene Cooper and Ian Johnson, in a front-page piece, laid out in minute detail the fact that many of the American corporations most eager for access to China's market actually have little interest in exporting goods from the U.S. to China. Their real plan is to invest in China, and to produce goods for the Chinese market within China, employing Chinese workers. This was exactly the argument labor opponents of permanent normal trade relations for China had been making.
A big story, no? And one especially relevant to last Wednesday's vote passing PNTR. For as Cooper and Johnson noted, business lobbyists had deliberately "played down" that vote's "likely impact on investment" because they were "leery of sounding supportive of labor-union arguments that the deal would prompt companies to move U.S. production to China." So when did the Journal run this article exposing the falsity of this particular pro-PNTR argument? The day after the vote.
The Washington Post also broke big news on China last week. On the front page, under a banner headline, the Post ran Thomas E. Ricks's 3,345 word story outlining how the Pentagon has shifted the focus of its concerns to Asia, and specifically, to China. Wargames, force planning, and strategic doctrine, according to Ricks, are all shifting in response to the growing perception among American strategists that a rising China poses the most formidable challenge to the United States in the years ahead.
Given the Clinton administration's insistence on the national security benefits that will accrue from passage of PNTR, this news, too, might have seemed relevant to congressional deliberations last week. And when did the Post run its story on the rising threat of China? Two days after the vote.
Forgive us for wondering if this is a coincidence. Both stories were long and painstakingly researched: Clearly, both had been in the works for weeks. Are we to suppose the Journal couldn't complete final editing on its story until one day after the PNTR vote? Was it coincidence that the Post couldn't get the Ricks story out until two days after the vote? We hear a lot about corporate influence on the editorial decisions of news organizations. This looks like a choice morsel for a media watchdog.