■"China's Trade Surplus Tripled, Topping $100 Billion Last Year," by Murray Hiebert, Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2006, p. A2.

The China trade surplus thing has long baffled me.

One, if we count intra-multinational corporate trade, we realize it's far smaller, as much of our "imports" from China consist of our corporations going over there and basically renting cheap Chinese labor. The alternative? I guess higher labor and less competitive goods, which is sure to win us the future high ground in this hyper-competitive global economy.

Two: our rising imbalance with China is nothing new, but just a shift of those past imbalances with the rest of Asia. China's stolen ASEAN and Japan's and South Korea's past shares of surplus and aggregated them unto itself. Big f**king deal, say I. Want to give them back to those countries so we can have higher wages, less ... oh, forget it!

And why not let that imbalance happen with China, because that flow of U.S. money, which comes back in China's Treasury buys and sticking dollars in our secondary mortgage markets and other capital markets (meaning we do awfully well in this transaction), can only help to speed China's marketization process, which only weakens the Party's control and pushes the political system, slowly but surely toward more pluralism.

Ah, but the Party seems to crack down on political dissent more and more!

Or is it that the Party HAS to crack down on such stirrings more and more?

And what is responsible for those stirrings? All this change brought on by China's embrace of globalization?

And doesn't China's rise also make the rest of the region more capitalistic in a defensive mode, thus furthering the long-term course of capitalism and democracy?

Or should we retaliate, depress our economic strength, put the money in arms, and plot for brilliant future great power wars with China?

Depending on your congressional district, this is a tough call. If you're not beholden to special interests, though, it's actually a fairly easy one.