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Congress, mostly. For an economist, lowering international trade barriers and turning the world into a free-market free-for-all is a one-way ticket to utopia. For an American textile worker or steel worker, globalization can hurt. Besides a large and hungry market, China will also bring a huge pool of cheap labor to the global table. A legitimate garment worker in China makes $70 a month, and the U.S. can't compete with that. While that means cheaper suits for U.S. buyers, it also means that some U.S. manufacturing jobs will go by the wayside. Those workers have powerful unions, and those unions know powerful politicians. And those politicians, such as North Carolina's Jesse Helms, are demanding concessions from the Chinese that the Chinese aren't willing to give.
What congressional isolationists may not realize is that the WTO, in the short term, will hurt China a lot more than it hurts the U.S. For the most part, Chinese businesses aren't ready for foreign competition. Bankruptcies and unemployement will skyrocket, causing far greater dislocations and economic turmoil than will be suffered in the U.S. But some U.S. business will indeed be hurt in the short term. Baumohl says that's the price of prosperity. "For the next 5-10 years, there will undoubtedly be some painful dislocations among low-skilled workers if China is admitted," he says. But making those transitions from raw-materials manufacturing to value-added goods and service is what landed the U.S. at the top of the '90s economic heap. "That's our comparative advantage," says Baumohl. One thing fueling isolatism in Congress has been the ballooning trade deficit with China. But the fastest way to reverse that is to open China's borders, not close our own. What we have to sell the Chinese is far more expensive than what they have to sell us. And there are a billion of them, just waiting to buy.
Of course, tapping that huge Chinese market has been a dream of Western businessmen for centuries. And it hasn't come true yet.