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Senate Expected to Overwhelmingly Endorse China Trade Bill Today

Aired September 19, 2000 - 10:10 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: China is about to become a full trading partner with the U.S. The Senate is expected give final congressional approval this afternoon to permanent normal trade relations with the world's most populous nation.

More now from CNN congressional correspondent Chris Black.

Chris, good morning.

CHRIS BLACK, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Daryn.

Daryn, the Senate is expected to overwhelmingly endorse the China trade bill today after the hardest fought lobbying campaign of this year. Senator Max Baucus of Montana, one of the White House pointmen on this issue, today predicted this will be one of the history books.

This legislation will end the practice of annual congressional review of China's trade and human rights policies. It also opens up the enormous Chinese market to U.S. goods. The big winners are expected to be the U.S. telecommunications and financial service industries and the American farmer.

But opponents, including organized labor, say this legislation will cost the U.S. more manufacturing jobs and only speed up that trend to sending low paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

Although the vote today does seem anticlimactic, we expect more than 70 senators to vote in favor of the bill, it has been a long time coming. It passed the House in May after a very intense lobbying campaign. And here in the Senate, there were 19 amendments that supporters had to beat back in order to get back to this day.

But they are expecting it to pass overwhelmingly, Daryn, and President Clinton will be speaking about this later today -- Daryn.

KAGAN: So, Chris, some of the opponents to this, like you mentioned, trade labor, people who represent human rights, these are still some strong lobbying groups. Will they have any avenues of expressing their criticism once this passes?

BLACK: Well, not really at this time. The supporters of the bill say that it's important to engage China. You cannot isolate it. And that unilateral sanctions, which would have been the outcome of Thompson amendment, which was the killer amendment here, just don't work.

So I think there's clearly a lot of support here. A number of U.S. senators in fact voted against amendments they agreed with because they felt it was so important to get this bill passed this year. So we will see more action on this probably next.

KAGAN: All right, Chris Black, on Capitol Hill, thank you very much.

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