HOW HE SEES IT China the giant casts shadow over U.S.

By JAY AMBROSE
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Back in the 1990s, the Cold War ended, much of the world breathed a sigh of relief, and Francis Fukuyama summed up the mood of many in a book called "The End of History," suggesting no more major collisions were in store for humankind. We could get on with peace and prosperity and the gradual democratizing of the planet.
How wrong he and many others were became obvious on 9/11, when terrorism came knocking on the door more loudly than ever, and wait ... what's that, the thud, thud, thud sound, as if a mighty giant is headed our way? It's China, big, big China, an increasingly well-armed nation of 1.3 billion people that has become a manufacturing whiz and could be the world's richest nation by roughly mid-century, displacing the United States in that category.
Perhaps the possibility poses no major threat to us. Let's hope not, but as we contemplate Prime Minister Hu Jintao's visit to the United States -- his compliments about Starbucks coffee, his chat with Bill Gates, his session with President Bush, his likeability -- let's don't overlook how China remains a repressive, rights-denying regime that at the moment is costing the United States plenty in oil prices and is making the world many times more dangerous in the process.
Whatever the gas-pump price to Americans, China's search for oil is not objectionable in and of itself -- it has to have this energy source, obviously, if it is to rescue hundreds of millions more of its people from the poverty that hundreds of millions have already escaped. But some of the tactics it employs are worse than objectionable. China is making deals that cut the United States and others out of markets and that are dependent on equipping genocidal monsters with the means of further extermination of masses of people.
There is no better example of this latter infamy than Sudan. The United States has refused to trade with this largest of all African countries because of its endless murder of millions. A Washington Post account tells us how China not only invests in Sudan to get oil, requiring that people be forcibly removed from ancestral dwellings, but has supplied the Sudanese military with the weapons needed to do the job. When the Sudanese need a friend in the United Nations, China has repeatedly stood up for them, complicating the task of ending the killing.
Petroleum hog
China has been no help in ending Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, either. It has opposed the sanctions that might dissuade Iran's leaders from a world-threatening course of action, and no wonder: China -- after the United States, the largest user of petroleum products in the world -- has a multibillion-dollar stake in Iran's oil reserves.
The problems with China as a responsible player in world affairs do not end with oil issues. More than any other nation, it is in a position to persuade North Korea to abandon nuclear weapons, but has been more pussycat than tiger. It is manipulating currency to assure its products will continue to flood into the United States -- I recently discovered some newly purchased cowboy boots were made in China, of all things -- while our exports will be at a price disadvantage in China. It ignores intellectual property rights.
It was a pleasure to see Hu's smiling face on TV as he toured the United States, but don't be misled that China's likely emergence as a superpower as the century goes on is itself something to grin about. If China does not reform -- if it does not quit tyrannizing its own people, if it does not quit abetting other regimes in their cruelties and infringements on world stability, if it does not quit refusing to observe the rules of the game in trade -- it could be as nasty and troublesome a superpower as the world has seen since the demise of the Soviet Union.
Clearly, a giant is walking toward us, promising to keep history very much alive. Let's keep fingers crossed that the talks occurring on this visit help in making the giant a friendly one.
X Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, is a columnist living in Colorado.