Movie Review: "Death by China," a film by Peter Navarro
by Dan La Botz
New Politics
September 20, 2012

http://newpol.org/node/697

To call this feature-length film xenophobic,
fear-mongering and hysterical almost understates the
case. The whole thing is so over-the-top that, like a
bad horror movie where you can see the strings moving
the monster, it leaves us numbed and bored or perhaps
laughing. Yet it's not funny.

"Death by China" opens with shoppers happily buying
cheap Chinese products, turns to closed American
factories, then to unemployed workers. Talking heads
tell us that China, without workers' rights or
environmental controls, competes unfairly with American
workers. The animation shows jobs rolling away to
Chinese factories, as Chinese bombers, labeled "money
manipulation" or "trade deficit," bomb the American
capitol repeatedly. Someone comments, "One day they're
going to own us."

China is shown as the conqueror of Tibet, as the
persecutor of the Falun Gong (imprisoning its believers
and harvesting their organs), and as the power behind
Iran and Pakistan. Chinese products shown in graphic
images threaten the lives and health of Americans,
including poisoning American children, as well as
killing American pets. Chinese pollution, dragged
across the Pacific by a Chinese bomber, covers the
United States with smog while dropping particulate
matter. We see Chinese preparations for massive
military buildup and the troops strutting and missiles
rolling through Tiananmen Square, as an authority tell
us that China "is the only country in the world
preparing to kill Americans." A Chinese knife stabs
into the heart of a stars-and-stripes map of America,
and the blood and life ooze out. (For a taste of this
film, see the trailer.)

While most of the incidents in the film are true,
simply turning from one to another does not help us
understand the situation any better. When the movie's
over, we don't know more about China than most of us
did when we went in, and in fact, its
oversimplifications of the reality of China and its
impact on the world would leave us knowing less, if we
could have believed them.

The film seems to be modeled on those 1950s
anti-Communist films that mixed cartoons, historical
footage and expert voices in the same way. In the end,
the film may be so crude that it becomes almost comic,
but the sentiments in it and the fears it plays to
could lead to tragic consequences if its virulent
nationalism were to take hold in the minds of anxious
people and find expression in ambitious parties and
politicians.

AFL-CIO Sponsors Showings

Who's promoting this bizarre film with its crude
cartoons and Cold War rhetoric? Organized labor. This
month, in big cities and small towns throughout Ohio
the AFL-CIO's local labor councils are sponsoring a
tour of Peter Navarro and showing of his feature length
film "Death by China," based on the premise that
America's central problem is an on-going and losing
trade war with China, a conflict every bit as serious
as a genuine military conflict. And failure to deal
with trade policy now, Navarro suggests will almost
inevitably lead to real military conflict in the not
too distant future. America's trade policy, the film
argues, has permitted the Chinese to take over American
markets, become America's chief creditor, and undermine
American security. Both at the opening and the end of
the film there were brief statements that America's
enemy is the Chinese government, not the Chinese
people, but those comments could not begin to temper
the dominant message: that the Chinese nation threatens
the American nation, and that we have to unite to stop
them.

Only in the last third of the film does Navarro begin
to argue that the real problem is multinational
corporations such as Cisco, Ford, Motorola, Intel,
Apple, Boeing and GE that move their facilities to
China to take advantage of low wages, lack of
environmental controls, and China's undervalued Yuan
currency in order to reap enormous profits. These
corporations and the National Association of
Manufacturers, we are told, use their wealth to
influence Congress and to shape America's trade
policies, taking their plants, technology, and jobs to
China. But, we are told by Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO's
Policy Director and Chief Economist, corporations are
supposed to make a profit: that's their job. Our job is
to get the government to force corporations to behave.
To do so, it is suggested, we need a political movement
that can force the government to change our trade
policy. Various speakers also suggest that we might
also need a movement to lead a boycott of Chinese
goods.

Navarro, an economics professor at the University of
California at Irvine who has run and lost three times
as a Democratic Party candidate in San Diego, calls his
film non-partisan. Bill Clinton and both Bushes are
castigated for their roles in bringing China into the
World Trade Organization. Both Republicans and
Democrats are featured in the film speaking out against
China's trade policies. Liberal activist actor Martin
Sheen narrates the film. Tim Ryan, a Democratic
congressman from Youngstown, Ohio, who has introduced
bipartisan legislation to stop China's currency
manipulation, is balanced by Dana Rohrabacher, an
arch-conservative Republican congressman from
California. Many of the talking heads come from the
U.S. government's U.S.-China Economic and Security
Review Commission, and hold a variety of mostly
conservative views. At the same time Richard Trumka,
president of the AFL-CIO, is prominently featured at a
couple of points in the film and policy director Thea
Lee more frequently. And clearly the AFL-CIO sees the
film as raising their issues, or they wouldn't be
promoting it.

"My goal," Navarro told the Cincinnati audience, "is to
get this issue out there and to get both presidential
candidates talking about it and promising to do
something about it. If Mitt Romney and Barack Obama
promise to deal with our China trade policy, then my
job is done," he told a mostly labor union audience at
the Esquire Theater in Cincinnati. Navarro's film
hardly seemed necessary to do that, as both candidates
have featured China trade policy in their campaign
advertising. Some of those in the audience suggested
that politicians will promise anything.

If trade policy is the central point of the film, the
maintenance and expansion of manufacturing is the
film's secondary theme. With multinational corporations
as the villains, the heroes are small- and medium-sized
business owners who the film argues are the country's
job creators. A number of small business owners, men
and women, commented on the ways in which Chinese
competition and U.S. trade policy had led to the
failure or decline of their business, or left them
wondering how they would be able to continue. There is
the suggestion that this group, the small business
class, would be the ones to lead the fight for the
future. Business men and women are the heroes. And the
workers?

What's Missing?

Surprisingly for a film being promoted by the AFL-CIO,
unions and workers hardly appear except as officials
speaking up for policy changes or as workers being laid
off. Unions nowhere appear as leading a social movement
to fight the multinational corporations or government
policies, nor are workers shown anywhere in the film in
collective action. While there is from time to time
talk of a need for a movement, we don't see workers
occupying the capitol building in Madison in 2011, and
we don't see the Occupy Wall Street movement that
followed it. (Actually, a couple of the people in the
film appear to have been interviewed at Occupy Wall
Street, though the videography lifts them out of the
occupation or demonstration, and Navarro carefully
avoids mentioning the Occupy movement.) Demonstrations
of real power that might lead to changes in policy are
nowhere to be seen in this movie.

Also missing are the Chinese workers. The film's Cold
War approach, where China is simply described as a
Communist totalitarian country fails to take into
account the profound political, economic and social
changes of the last few decades. Most important it
leaves out of the account altogether the enormous
Chinese labor movement that has arisen in the last few
years. Every year China sees tens of thousands of
protests involving workers and peasants, and those
struggles have led both to immediate relief in some
cases and to structural reforms that have given workers
slightly more leeway. (See Eli Friedman, "China in
Revolt.")

Talking to the audience in the Esquire Theater after
the film's showing, Peter Navarro suggested that we in
America need to get together and change trade policy.
We need, he said, to be able to compete. The film's
goal is to build a fortress America that can resist the
Chinese bombers. To bring together Democrats and
Republicans, small business and labor to change U.S.
trade policy. Nowhere is there a suggestion of the need
for a struggle to defeat the multinational corporations
or to deal with the capitalist system. China, not
capitalism is the problem. That's a message that should
make the multinational corporate executives and medium-
and small-businesspeople sleep better. Though those
Chinese bombers flying toward the capitol will steal
the sleep from some.

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