In the year 2000, President Bill Clinton stood before the American public and declared that bringing China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) would be a victory for freedom, trade, and democracy. What he didn’t say—and perhaps didn’t fully understand—was that this single decision would reshape global power dynamics, weaken U.S. manufacturing, and directly fund the rise of a strategic rival.
As Edouard Prisse lays bare in We Are Funding China’s Growth: That Must Stop!, this moment marked the start of what he calls “one of the biggest policy errors of the 21st century.”
Let’s rewind. Clinton’s speech selling China’s WTO accession was optimistic, bordering on utopian. He claimed that America would gain access to a billion consumers, that China would become more open and democratic, and that the U.S. wouldn’t even need to make new concessions. It was all upside, he assured us.
But the reality, Prisse writes, is that Clinton was either misinformed or misled. In fact, the policy did everything it wasn’t supposed to do.
Rather than importing American values, China imported Western capital. The anticipated “opening” of Chinese markets never truly happened. Instead, what the West received was an ever-widening trade imbalance. China’s exports surged, U.S. factories shut down, and by 2022, China’s trade surplus had ballooned to an astounding $870 billion—an outcome Prisse describes as “an unmitigated financial windfall for an authoritarian regime.”
China used this surplus not to liberalize or democratize, but to:
- Subsidize state-run businesses and dominate global industries like steel and electronics.
- Build a massive war chest of foreign reserves exceeding $3 trillion.
- Fund infrastructure projects across the world to gain political leverage (the Belt and Road Initiative).
- Expand military capabilities and increase pressure on Taiwan.
In short, China became richer, more powerful, and more assertive—and the West footed the bill.
So why did this happen?
Prisse is clear: Western leaders, starting with Clinton, fundamentally misunderstood who they were dealing with. They viewed China through a post-Cold War lens, assuming that economic freedom would naturally lead to political freedom. They believed China wanted to become “like us.” But as Prisse warns, this was a fantasy.
What they missed is that China’s system is not capitalist, democratic, or even conventionally market-driven. It is a Communist dictatorship with centralized control over labor, capital, and production—and it was fully prepared to exploit the West’s open market systems while protecting its own.
The irony? While Clinton promised new markets for American exports, what the U.S. got instead was a new dependency on Chinese imports, and a rival with the means to challenge U.S. leadership across the globe.
Prisse doesn’t mince words. “It is imperative that the U.S. and Europe acknowledge the mistake and act now to stop the consequences,” he writes.
His solution? End free trade and replace it with equal trade—where imports from China must match exports in value. This would shrink China’s surplus, limit its financial leverage, and begin to correct two decades of damage.
Clinton’s intentions may have been good. But the outcome was disastrous.
And until we recognize the magnitude of that mistake, we’ll keep paying the price—one shipping container, one factory closure, one lost advantage at a time.
