China the unifier

Dana Milbank:

At various times over the past five years, Chinese dissident Yang Jianli was handcuffed, beaten, held in solitary confinement, deprived of daylight for months at a time, and forced to sit straight and motionless for four hours a day.

Yesterday, the newly freed Yang got a hero's welcome in Washington from the lawmakers who pressured Beijing to release him. "My dear friends," he told a roomful of cameras as his American wife fought back tears, "it is heartening to be able again to stand on this great land as a free man."

Great land, free man: Hearing those words spoken with Yang's moral authority, even the most jaded reporters in the room could feel a lump in the throat.

It's a shame most of official Washington was on vacation, for they missed that rarest of events in the capital. At a time of nonstop squabbling over a hamstrung war, a hapless attorney general and a humbling fiscal outlook, a group of Democrats and Republicans actually agreed on something.

And so it came to pass yesterday that Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.), Democratic firebrand, hailed the work of Hank Paulson, the Republican Treasury secretary. Chris Cox, Republican congressman-cum-Bush administration official, gave a nod to Frank and the efforts of both parties in Congress. It was, for a moment, a reunion of the grand Cold War coalition in which Democrats and Republicans alike fought for the liberty of Natan Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents.

"I know there is a lot of discussion about how Washington has gotten too partisan," observed Frank, an occasional contributor to that condition. "This was a Democratic committee chairman and a Republican secretary of the Treasury combining to get the Communist government of China to release him."

The Chinese have a knack for unifying the otherwise fractious American political system. In advance of next year's Beijing Olympiad, China is gunning for a gold medal in international misbehavior. First came the pet-food chemicals that imperiled American cats and dogs. Then came the lead in Thomas the Tank Engine, Dora the Explorer and other children's toys. Throw in the trade deficit, currency fights and China's blind eye toward Sudan's genocide, and lawmakers require little coaxing to bash Beijing.

Frank, scolding China for its "grave error" in holding Yang, used the occasion to talk up legislation restricting China's access to America's financial markets.

Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took the opportunity to demand that China change its policy toward Sudan and Tibet. "I am again calling on the government of China to fall in line with the civilized world," he said.

...

It is not clear to me that China needs our capital markets with all its excess cash. apparently it has not figured out how to do capitalism on its own yet. Must be a lack of capitalist tools. They have learned how to manufacture almost everything but capitalism. It is surprising that they have overlooked something so basic, but communism does that to people. Communism has been described as state capitalism where the state has all the capital and makes all the decisions. That is a case where centralized decision making is the least efficient.