Politics & Power Quote by Jo Ann Emerson

The line reads like a policy memo, but its real target is emotional: it turns a messy, decades-long story about globalization into a culprit you can name, map, and fix. Emerson points to two facts with built-in moral charge - “largest trade deficit” and “Permanent Normal Trade Relations” - then welds them to a third claim, currency policy, that implies the deficit isn’t an accident of consumer demand or corporate supply chains but the product of a rigged playing field.

The specific intent is political leverage. By emphasizing that China “enjoys” PNTR, she frames trade status as a privilege the U.S. granted and could reconsider. “Ties its currency to the dollar” functions as a neat shorthand for manipulation: even if the mechanics are more complex, the phrase signals unfair advantage, and it implicitly absolves domestic actors (importers, retailers, policymakers) who benefited from cheaper goods.

The subtext is a critique of bipartisan trade orthodoxy from the 1990s into the 2000s - the era when PNTR for China was sold as a pathway to liberalization and mutual gain. Emerson’s sentence reverses that sales pitch: normalized trade didn’t normalize behavior; it normalized American vulnerability. “More competitive trading partner” is doing double duty, sounding diplomatic while hinting that China’s competitiveness is engineered, not earned.

Context matters: this is the language of mid-2000s economic anxiety, when manufacturing job losses and offshoring became kitchen-table politics, and “China” became the umbrella explanation for wage stagnation, deindustrialization, and Washington’s failure to anticipate the consequences of its own trade architecture.