ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the most-favored-nation /human rights debate and the immediate political events that surrounded the presidential decision to renew China's most-favored-nation trading status without human rights conditions. It discusses U. S. trade policy toward China and the linkage of trade and human rights. The U. S. linkage of trade and human rights occurred, for the most part, during the 1970s. Historically, however, the United States first linked trade and human rights more than a century ago through the Tariff Act of 1890, which banned imports of goods manufactured by convict labor. Beyond the Cold War-based strategic trade policy of the Reagan administration, U. S. trade policy was economically motivated by comparative cost advantage. By the 1970s the United States, to a significantly greater degree than its western allies, began to consider economic measures in the form of sanctions on development assistance or exports in order to pressure countries to respect human rights.
