China Policy

Secretary of State Warren Christopher on Friday called for regular visits by U.S. and Chinese cabinet officers to each other's capitals, restoring the sort of high-level contacts that Washington suspended after Chinese troops crushed the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Christopher's suggestion was intended as a goodwill gesture toward the Chinese leadership, which views such full-dress exchanges as a demonstration of China's international standing.

LEBANON, Ohio - Mitt Romney on Saturday seized upon the Obama administration delaying action on Chinese trade practices till after the election, arguing that the move was proof that President Obama has failed to protect the nation's trade. “We're going to make sure that when people cheat -- and China's been cheating - we're not going to let it go on,” Romney told about 10,700 supporters gathered on a picturesque small-town street. INTERACTIVE: Predict a winner in the battleground states He highlighted that on Friday, the Treasury Department delayed releasing a report on international trade and exchange rates in which they would have had to say whether China ought to be labeled a currency manipulator.

LEBANON, Ohio - Mitt Romney on Saturday seized upon the Obama administration delaying action on Chinese trade practices till after the election, arguing that the move was proof that President Obama has failed to protect the nation's trade. “We're going to make sure that when people cheat -- and China's been cheating - we're not going to let it go on,” Romney told about 10,700 supporters gathered on a picturesque small-town street. INTERACTIVE: Predict a winner in the battleground states He highlighted that on Friday, the Treasury Department delayed releasing a report on international trade and exchange rates in which they would have had to say whether China ought to be labeled a currency manipulator.

A new TV commercial from Mitt Romney's campaign accuses President Obama of contributing to American job losses by showing weakness toward China, a line of attack that has proved popular for Romney on the stump. The ad, set for release Tuesday, blames Obama for failing to stop China from stealing American intellectual property, and draws a direct line from that to the loss of 2.1 million U.S. jobs. As images scroll by of a shuttered factory and a "Made in China" bar code, a narrator intones: "Fewer Americans are working today than when President Obama took office.

I appreciate Jim Mann's "Clinton's 'Berlin Wall' Theory on China Steeped in Paradoxes" (Feb. 12). Culturally, we must understand that any act of accommodation by the U.S. would be viewed by the Chinese Communist regime as signs of weakness, and would be used to strengthen the Communist stature domestically. Hence, Clinton's "Berlin Wall" theory would not only not work, but help to support the regime both internally and internationally. As an opposition party to the Communist regime in China, we do not oppose the U.S. policy of engagement, but the U.S. must engage with a proactive plan that will not only engage Beijing economically and politically, but most important, help liberalize Chinese society and its system by inducing changes.

President George Bush has won the fight to sustain his veto of a law that would have protected Chinese students in the United States against forced repatriation to their homeland. His victory, however, has come at considerable cost and the results hardly can be regarded as a vote of confidence in the President's approach to Sino-American relations. In the end, 62 senators and 390 members of the House voted against the Administration.

Thanks for your in-depth coverage on China (June 25). The case of a gerontocracy turned "gerontocrazy" reminds me of the ancient Roman Senate, so-called for being made of "senes" or senescent members. A graphic Latin saying characterizes that citadel of power for all ages and cultures: " Senatores, boni viri; senatus, mala bestia " (The senators, decent guys; the senate, a wild beast.) MARY C. GARIANO Northridge

House Republicans should not be making foreign policy, especially in this time of tension between China and Taiwan. Nevertheless, they have chosen to introduce a resolution calling for explicit guarantees of a U.S. military defense of Taiwan should the island be attacked by China. The nonbinding resolution, the 40-member House Republican Policy Committee said, would express the sense of Congress.

China will use abortions, sterilization and marriage bans to "avoid new births of inferior quality and heighten the standards of the whole population," the official New China News Agency said this week. The measures will be aimed at people likely to pass on congenital illnesses or defects to their children, the agency said. It added that the birth of more than 10 million people with such defects could have been prevented.

WASHINGTON - Even before a blind human rights lawyer slipped away from house arrest in rural China last week, Washington and Beijing were each trying to navigate a turbulent time in their internal politics and their relationship. Now they are trying to avoid their worst diplomatic spat in years. Although U.S. officials are mum, Chen Guangcheng's supporters are believed to have outwitted his guards and then spirited Chen several hundred miles from his village to seek refuge with U.S. diplomats in Beijing.

The palace intrigue surrounding the shape of China'snext leadership is thick. Rumors abound about who's up, who's down and who's out. What is fairly certain is that Vice President Xi Jinping, who arrives Thursday in Los Angeles for a visit, will become general secretary of the Communist Party in November and China's next president in March 2013. What we do not yet know is who will fill the remaining open slots on the powerful Politburo Standing Committee, as seven of the nine members retire.

A helping hand or a handout? Re "Jobless to be a political force," Sept. 22, and "Jobless dispute complacency claim," Sept. 22 Eighteen months ago, I offered a job to an applicant who had been unemployed for three weeks. Although she was happy with the job, the salary and the benefits, she turned down my offer. Frankly, she told me, she wanted to to exhaust her unemployment benefits. She reasoned that by the time she factored in gas, childcare, lunches, work clothes, etc., she considered it a "wash.

You go, Go Daddy. Like Google Inc., the leading registrar of Internet domain names is pushing back against Chinese censorship, announcing Wednesday that it will stop selling domain names based in China. The company says the Chinese government demanded that it identify its customers, a clearly unacceptable requirement that would have allowed officials not just to block sites they didn't like but to go after the owners. Rival domain registrar Network Solutions said it has pulled out of China for the same reason.

The man from family planning liked to prowl around the mountaintop village, looking for diapers on clotheslines and listening for the cry of a hungry newborn. One day in the spring of 2004, he presented himself at Yang Shuiying's doorstep and commanded: "Bring out the baby." Yang wept and argued, but, alone with her 4-month-old daughter, she was in no position to resist the man every parent in Tianxi feared. "I'm going to sell the baby for foreign adoption. I can get a lot of money for her," he told the sobbing mother as he drove her with the baby to an orphanage in Zhenyuan, a nearby city in the southern province of Guizhou.

The Olympic torch relay was invented by the Nazis. According to historians, Adolf Hitler wanted to promote his belief in an Aryan master race by symbolically linking the 1936 Berlin Games to the ancient Greek gods and rituals, hence the carrying of the flame from Olympia to Germany. The first relay was chronicled on film by Hitler's propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl.

About 300 Vietnamese Americans from Orange County boarded buses for the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles on Wednesday to protest China's territorial claims over the Paracel and Spratly islands in the South China Sea. The protesters said the islands had historically belonged to Vietnam. However, the Chinese government recently formed a county government to run a small cluster of the islands.

In a decision that could trigger a new round of transpacific trade tension, the Bush administration reversed a decades-old policy Friday and said it would impose sanctions to protect U.S. papermakers from illegally subsidized Chinese imports. Ruling on a complaint by an Ohio papermaker, the Commerce Department said China -- classified for the last 23 years as a "non-market economy" -- would now be treated like any other country accused of unfairly subsidizing exports.