Selling Red To China

When Tariffs Go Down, American Sales Go Up

(CBS)  When American business looks at China, CBS News Business Correspondent Anthony Mason reports, it sees the world's most populated country and limitless possibilities.

The grapes from Wente Vineyards, for example, go all around the world. The California company exports a quarter of a million cases of wine a year to 150 countries, including China.

That's why owner Eric Wente was behind the China trade bill.

"We've spent a lot of time and effort marketing in China. We've been to trade fairs, done promotions, done wine tastings," said Wente. "We consider this a very significant market."

Businesses are also eager to launch new ventures in China. For example, someone has to build the cellular phone system, says Clyde Prestowitz, a trade negotiator in the Reagan administration.

"Here is China with a population of a billion plus, most of whom don't have telephones," said Prestowitz, now at the Economic Strategy Institute. "So just in that area alone you are looking at tens of billions—if not hundreds of billions—of dollars."

Organized labor threw all it's muscle against the bill, arguing that business is selling out human rights principles to get some cheap labor.

"We cannot relinquish our only economic leverage against a country that offers up its people as sacrifices to multinational corporations," AFL-CIO president John Sweeney has argued.

But business leaders say it's not about jobs.

"First of all, we have to recognize the U.S. has full employment. So we're not losing jobs to some other country," said Prestowitz. "The problem is, right now we don't have enough people to fill all the jobs."

For Wente, it's about sales. He now sells about 5,000 cases of wine a year in China.

The rollback of tariffs, said Wente, could mean that "over a 10-15 year period, I would say that we should be able to double, triple, quadruple our sales or better."