News: May 2005 Archives

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BEIJING

The most important person in the world right now may be Hu Jintao, and we're beginning to get a better sense of what kind of a leader he is: disappointing.

More than anyone else, President Hu will determine whether China can continue to surge and whether its rise will be stable and peaceful. Ever since he vaulted into the top ranks of the Communist Party in 1992, there have been vigorous debates about whether he is a closet reformer or a closet hard-liner, but now that he has been the Communist leader for two and a half years, we can form a tentative conclusion: the second camp seems to have been right.

Mr. Hu appears to be an intuitive authoritarian who believes in augmenting the tools of repression, not easing them. Most distressing, Mr. Hu has tugged China backward politically. He has presided over a steady crackdown on dissent, the news media, religion, Internet commentary and think tanks. China now imprisons far more journalists than any other country.

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By PAT CHOATE

CHINA is the global epicenter of pirating and counterfeiting. By its government's own estimate, China's domestic trade in bogus goods accounts for $19 billion to $24 billion annually. That is undoubtedly a significant understatement, and it doesn't even include the stolen technologies and phony brands China exports to the rest of the world. Since welcoming China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the United States has had a historic opportunity to stop the Chinese piracy trade. So far, the Bush administration has failed to seize it.

I opposed bringing China into the trade organization, and I don't like the idea of subordinating America's sovereignty to undemocratic international institutions like the W.T.O. But those decisions are behind us, and the worst thing we can do now is to fail to use the limited tools that the W.T.O. provides for protecting our economic interests.

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