The export trade of China is in a shambles. Not proportionally, of course. Still...could the most rapacious of capitalisms have been worse? It's not just that the guy whose company had been black-balled by Mattel for coating its toys with toxic paint had committed hari-kiri. No, no, that's a Japanese guilt ritual. Anyway: Mattel has turned back at least 18.2 million toys. Including some of my grandson's favorites: Thomas the truck. Or is it Thomas the tank? I think, actually, that it's Thomas the engine. My friends at Hasbro have also been taken in by Chinese recklessness. It's also the case that 100,000 children's bottles have been pulled from the shelves at the ASDA chain in Britain. And, as Kerry Brown pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, "Only three months ago, pet food from China was poisoning American dogs. Toothpaste with traces of poison followed." Oh, yes: 46 million batteries made in China and used with Nokia cellphones are, as Kevin J. O'Brien suggested in the IHT, "yet another example of sub-standard production in China." It goes on and on. Another safety issue that China has to face is the smog that is likely to smother the Beijing Olympics. The authorities have already taken 1.3 million cars off the capital's roads in a test that allowed them to assure Olympic officials that no one would die from asphyxiation at the Games. This was after the team doctor for Spain's tri-athletes commented to the Wall Street Journal that Beijing air "was deadly for any endurance event." Oops! Why is this festival of sports being held in Beijing in the first place? Anyway, China pledges to clear the poisons before the athletes arrive. Fat chance. Meanwhile, Reuters points out in a dispatch from Tokyo that smog from China has for the first time in 30 years affected Japanese cities and the remote countryside. China is the most peculiar social configuration of our time: the most rapacious capitalism in the world and among the very last communist tyrannies. What motivates it? This is for others--those who know--to say. But as Richard McGregor reported in the FT, "China has the largest gap between rich and poor in Asia." Except for Nepal. Oh, well. I recall during my graduate school days the many enthusiasts of Communist China. I wish I could muster the name of their "scholarly" organization. Most of them were acolytes of John King Fairbank. Poor man he was very learned but had no political intelligence. In the end, he was as sophisticated and as deceptive as Edgar Snow, Wilfred Burchett, Felix Greene, Han Suyin, Anna Louise Strong. Names you probably don't know. Thank God for that. But it's not the tyranny of prosperous China that agitates the Democrats. It's the four million children's bracelets adorned with lead paint about which they are exercised. What agitates Bush about China remains a mystery.