After watching Peter Navarro’s documentary “Death by China,” you may want to stop buying products from that Communist-ruled land. Trouble is, you may not be able to find an alternative. That’s exactly what happened to a woman interviewed in the film, whose well-off American family does without a microwave because she’s unable to find one not imported from what another talking head calls “the worst human rights abuser in the world.”
Narrated by Martin Sheen, the film looks at what it calls America’s increasingly destructive trade relationship with China — we owe them $3 trillion — which goes back to the Asian nation’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. We hear claims that instead of helping both lands, as President Clinton promised at the time, the deal has resulted in the loss of millions of American jobs and the influx here of shoddy, even deadly Chinese products.
“Death by China” gives that nation a black eye for currency manipulation, intellectual-property theft, political persecution and serious environmental pollution. Navarro also takes a swipe at greedy multinational American corporations that outsource jobs. His points are well taken, but the doc tells us little we don’t already know and is overwhelmingly one-sided. It would make a nice TV infomercial, but certainly doesn’t deserve a big-screen release.