Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval

by Jon Hilsenrath

In September 2000, with a Senate vote of 83–15, Clinton convinced Congress to allow normal US trade relations with China and paved the way for its admission into the World Trade Organization. For years the United States had already been granting China annual, but temporary, access to US markets with low tariff barriers. Normal trade relations removed the uncertainty of renewals every year. Clinton hoped it would formalize China’s cooperation with a club of rules-bound trading partners and help open the markets of the world’s most populous country to US companies hungry for a billion new customers. He also hoped an open China would lead to a more democratic China, and one less threatening to others. Reformers were in charge in Beijing, and Clinton wanted to empower them. A collection of 149 economists—including all of the luminaries who signed the NAFTA letter—banded together again to support the move. “There is much more at stake here than our economic self-interests,” Clinton said after the vote. The decision, he said, was “about building a world in which more human beings have more freedom, more control over their lives, more contact with others than ever before.”