Today's Wall Street Journal ran on op-ed column by a Chinese trade official calling for more access for Chinese goods to U.S. markets. As if we're not already getting enough Chinese imports dumped on our store shelves. Just last week, there was a major new story about Chinese dry-wall used to build homes in Florida. It is emitting vapors that cause copper water pipes to turn black with corrosion. No one knows why, but like the tainted heparin that killed about a hundred Americans, the melamine in dog food, the melamine in baby formula, the tainted toothpaste and cough syrup that killed or sickened dozens in Central America. this is just the latest example of how China is an unsafe trade partner. I'd like to build the Chinese trade official a house made from that substandard dry wall. Better still, let him lead a trade mission to Florida to meet with the homeowners whose houses are now uninhabitable due to the nixous emissions from the Chinese dry wall.  

We had a book signing at Poor Richard's last night. The turnout was good and the talk stimulating. This independent bookstore (and so much more!) is our favorite downtown Colorado Springs haunt. It's where our writers group met weekly over the past year or so, talking about our works in progress and those still in our heads instead of on paper. The clientele at Poor Richard's range from college students hanging out over coffee and computers to lively discussion groups, people just out for a bite to eat or a glass of wine or a place to read, to authors talking about the topics they've written about.

Yesterday was a warm spring day and lots of people were out. A recurrent question that came up as we talked about Tibet boiled down to this: how can we be hopeful about changing China when the situation seems hopeless because of China's immense power? To many people, even starting to try to change China seems futile because the goal just seems too big, unattainable.

It's a good question and we talked about it afterwards over dinner at Blue Star, another of our local favorites. We decided it's hard for people to get their heads around the idea of changing China, maybe too hard. So we need to make the goal more easy to grasp.

We don't have to change all of China through economic action. All we have to do is change our own buying habits. This is kind of like the journey of a 1,000 miles that begins with a single step. The goal is for enough of us to do it to reduce China's GDP by 1-2%. If that happens this year, China won't meet its growth goals, and the resulting unemployment will create discontent. That will put pressure on the regime, especially if that loss of 1-2% is attributed to their mishandling of Tibet.

We'll quantify what 1-2 percent of China's GDP means in the next day or two in terms of how many of us it will take to make this a reality. China may seem like a giant, but even giants have their vulnerabilities.             

The Group of 20 meets formally tomorrow in London, and the streets are thronged with protestors. Unions, anti-corporate activists, anarchists, and anti-globalists are putting on the biggest show of street theater seen in a decade. They're drawn together to protest what White House economics advisor Lawrence Summers derided as "stateless economic elites" in a candid op-ed column in the Financial Times published last year. Back then, Summers was a private citizen instead of an appointed official, so he was free to say what he really thinks -- which he did in a series of prescient columns on the problems of the global economy. In particular, he took shots at the corporate elite, which reaped huge profits from a flawed global economy that was hollowing out the middle class in the industrialized world. 

The London street protestors represent only the most active fraction of a growing backlash against the existing global trade regime. Once again, it is the Financial Times (a great newspaper) where the keenest analysis about the world economic crisis can be found, specifically in today's column by Martin Wolf, titled "Why G20 Leaders Will Fail to Deal with the Big Challenge." (FT, April 1, p. 11) My summary of Wolf's thoughtful critique won't do the subtlety of his reasoning justice, but the gist of his column is that nothing -- NOTHING -- any world leaders have done to date or can achieve at the G20 will correct the fundamental lack of balance in the world trading system. This is a huge flaw, and the core problem which has created the twin crises of a financial meltdown and simultaneous global recession.

Wolf names as the big beneficiaries of the lopsided world trading system three countries: China, Japan, and Germany. He blames inaction by all three for the current economic crisis. All three share in common the hope that the world's big consuming nations, lead by America and Europe, will start spending again on their exports. Wolf points out that because much American and European consumption over the past decade was fueled by easy credit, which has vanished and isn't coming back, these hopes are forlorn. The remedy, he says, is for China, Germany, and Japan to start consuming more, buying our exports, helping to drive growth in the US and EU as well as their own countries. Here's the rub: nothing China, Germany or Japan are doing will create that outcome. They are waiting for the old order, the now-vanished order, to resume. 

China, in fact, is betting the ranch on it.

Lop-sided trade is China's formula for growth, and without it, the regime will crumble. That's why global trade anarchy may be Tibet's best hope for autonomy.

Let's say Martin Wolf is right -- and his track record so far on the global economic meltdown is very impressive -- that nothing our leaders have done will correct the global trade imbalance. That leaves China in the precarious position of depending on US and EU consumers starting to buy again -- which is unlikely due to macro-economic reasons. Like massive unemployment.
 
This is the kind of environment where activism -- boycotts, sanctions -- can become the catalyst for political change in CXhina far more easily than if non-activist consumers were still spending freely. Activists can make the margin of difference now, the crucial 1-3% drop in Chinese sales abroad that will force the regime from barely making its growth targets into missing them and facing rising social discontent -- and then panic in the Politburo.

See the article, "The Struggle in Saffron," by John Goekler and Merle Lefkoff of the Madrona Institute in the March 13-15 issue of Counterpunch. You can read it here. http://www.counterpunch.org/goekler03132009.html

Counterpunch is edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. I once traveled with a writer named St. Clair in Croatia and I wonder if he's the same guy. "The Struggle in Saffron" outlines how a social movement to aid Tibet can get started and why the timing is right. I think the authors are on target, except in one regard. They think this movement has to succeed within 6-12 months. I think the window of opportunity is legthier, more like 36 months, and I draw that conclusion from economists like Martin Wolf who point out that this downturn will be around for quite a while yet.

Headlines from today's major financial press, such as "Global Slump Seen Deepening: (Wall Street Journal April 1 banner on front page) reinforce Wolf's pessimism. The US stock market is rising, but that is largely because fears of a banking meltdown are over. But don't mistake the banking meltdown with the broader world economic recession, the first of its magnitude since the 1940s. The broader recession results from an unsustainable global trading system. The financial crisis was caused by this unsustainable system, not the other way around. In March a record 724,000 Americans lost jobs. This is being repeated in developed countries around the planet. There is a growing employment crisis, and it's affecting mainly middle class workers of all educational levels throughout the developed world. 

If we awaken the political consciousness of these people, and give them a way to put pressure on China, we can accomplish two objectives: we can bring greater freedom to China, and we can bring about fundamental changes in economic and trade policy to create a sustainable, fair global trade system that doesn't depend on cannibalizing jobs in the developed world in order to foster growth.

Sadly. two very good people we know were among those 724,000 people who lost their jobs this month -- our editor, Robert Shuman, and publicist Kama Timbrell at AMACOM. Bob gets all the credit for seeing "Freeing Tibet" into print, and Kama has halped draw attention to the book and Tibet's cause. Bob championed the book, nurturing it from proposal to publication, patiiently helping us to see where we strayed and getting us back on track as the work progressed. He also had the courage to back the book's call for activism. Let's hope they are back in publishing at good jobs again soon. The quicker we tackle China, restore balance to global trade, the quicker good people like these will be employed. 

This isn't just about saving Tibet or promoting democracy in China. It's about a sustainable world economy, saving our jobs, and saving our future too. Interdependence is the key word.