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Supplement One: History of US Labor’s China Bashing Campaigns
The China bashing campaign had deep roots in U.S. labor movements for over 100 years, beginning from Chinese exclusion acts (which was the first major political action taken by US labor movement, and AFL). Chinese workers in U.S. historically had been stereotyped as "job stealing" "union busting" people (during the labor strikes on late 19th century, many bosses will ship Chinese workers to replace the striking workers). It created a huge anti-Chinese feeling within the labor movement and lead to the labor supports the racist Chinese exclusion acts. And many anti-Chinese race riots led by poor White inner-city workers throughout out the U.S. between 1880s to 1910 destroyed dozen Chinese settlements and killed hundreds of Chinese-Americans.
It’s true that the phase out of the MFA (Multi-Fiber Arrangement) by the end of the 2004 will affect the global garment industries. The less capable countries will be loosing their productions to the countries with better production efficiency and cheaper labor costs, most analysts agrees that the biggest “losers” will be the garment industries from central America, east Africa, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the biggest “winners” will be China and India.
It’s an important issue that anti-globalization and labor movements should raise their concern. However the top of the U.S. labor movements, instead of fighting against the multinational corporations and the government policies, they decided to work with right wing forces looking for an easy boogieman to the blame the problems to China, with "labor rights" as a sexy message. It’s a same old racist protectionism campaigns during 1980's against Japan for their automobile and steel imports, at late 1980's against Korea and Taiwan for their cheap imports, and 1990’s blaming Mexico for the NAFTA job loss in the United States.
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