If President Obama can raise just one human rights issue at the summit this week with Chinese President Hu Jintao, he should speak for China's disappeared.
The monumental presence of China already is on American soil, well before the state visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao, who arrives in Washington on Tuesday with a bustling entourage and a full agenda.
In one of the great comedic routines of all time, Abbott and Costello went round and round about a baseball player by the name of Who and which base he was on. As Chinese President Hu Jintao shows up to be feted in Washington this week, the question is not whether Who's on first but whether Mr. Hu's becoming first - the leader of a nation on a trajectory not merely to rival the United States as a "peer competitor" but to supplant it as the world's only superpower. Unfortunately, the answer may be no laughing matter.
''It is not every day that the queen and the British prime minister welcome a state leader who ordered his troops to mow down unarmed civilians." So begins a British newspaper report by eminent China scholar and editor Jonathan Mirsky on the visit of Hu Jintao to England in 2001. At the time, Mr. Hu was only No. 2 in China.
The Obama administration is lowering expectations ahead of the first state visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao during the Obama presidency.
In a speech at the State Department ahead of a state visit next week by Chinese President Hu Jintao, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that U.S.-China relations were at a "critical juncture."
Loose-money policies in the United States have combined with robust growth in China and other emerging nations in recent months to set off a price spiral in food, energy and other basic goods needed to run the economy.
What may come as a surprise to some people is that simply buying stocks and bonds does not make you an investor.
A state-owned Chinese bank says its New York City branch has begun offering accounts denominated in China's tightly controlled yuan in a new move to expand the currency's global reach.
