One Billion Customers - James McGregor [76]
Pieter Bottelier, the World Bank’s chief representative in Beijing and a trusted adviser to the Chinese government, stirred up the Chinese financial bureaucracy with letters and personal meetings. Bottelier was genuinely outraged by the Xinhua directive, calling it “the most regressive step China has taken since it began economic reforms.” His actions were key in framing the issue for China’s financial policy makers.
We also used the law to elevate what was really a domestic political fight to the level of an international legal dispute. We searched for all the laws and agreements we could find that had even a remote bearing on our case. We found a July 1984 Chinese law that ordered “every entity and individual” with access to foreign information to collect “important scientific and technological intelligence materials” and hand them over to the Chinese military. That was evidence, we said, that Xinhua was basically under orders to steal our technology. We also used “fair and equal competition” clauses in trade agreements between the United States and China to demand that Xinhua give us all of their price lists, customer lists, the technical specifications of their financial information business, and all the other details they were requiring that we hand over to them.
As these legal issues bounced back and forth in letters, senior officials in the Chinese ministries of foreign affairs and foreign trade became helpful strategic advisers to us. They told me which American officials should send letters to which Chinese officials. They helped me think through the most palatable way to present our arguments. The sophisticated officials in these ministries viewed the Xinhua moves as a regressive money grab that was detrimental to China’s accession to the WTO. They wanted the Xinhua issue resolved and off the table so they could focus on WTO.
The Old Versus the New
Three months after the Xinhua directive came down, in my role as chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, I led a group of twenty-five American business executives who had operations in China on a lobbying trip to Washington to seek renewal of China’s MFN trading status. Following the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, Congress used the annual renewal of China’s MFN status for a wide-ranging congressional debate on China that covered everything from human rights to missile proliferation. Every year, legislators introduced bills to deny renewal of China’s MFN status. If passed, the result would have been punitive tariffs that could derail China’s economic growth because the United States was China’s dominant export market. Our annual AmCham lobbying trip was aimed at educating Congress, the White House, and even the Pentagon that the more business done with China the better.
Xinhua had assured me before I left for Washington that implementing regulations for its January decree would not be published while I was away and that when issued they would reduce the scope of Xinhua’s regime to “minimal interference.” On April 15, 1996, I escorted several American executives to meet with the editorial board of The Washington Post to make our case for the renewal of China’s MFN status. That night I returned to my hotel to find a flurry of phone messages and faxes from Beijing. Xinhua had not only announced the enforcement regulations, but the details were extremely onerous. This, to me, was strong evidence that Chinese security officials were the ultimate backer of this information control regime. The trade minister, foreign minister, central bank governor, and even the Chinese WTO negotiators were not in favor of these Xinhua regulations, but here was Xinhua storming ahead at full speed.
A reporter from The Washington Post called me to ask if I felt like a fool for leading business executives to lobby for China on Capitol Hill while China’s main news agency was stealing Dow Jones’s business. I was extremely