No more bending over backward

Since its inauguration, the Obama administration has bent over backward to accommodate China, playing down Chinese human rights offenses, refusing to brand China a currency manipulator and toning down criticism of crackdowns in Tibet and Xinjiang.

However, this policy of accommodation, designed to encourage China's willingness to accept greater responsibility for global affairs, hasn't shown much success.

The Copenhagen conference showed that Beijing puts a much higher priority on its own economic development than on climate change. And Chinese actions, in Copenhagen and elsewhere, suggest that Beijing feels it no longer needs to pay as much heed to the United States as before.

European countries were particularly enraged by Chinese behavior in Copenhagen. The British climate secretary, Ed Miliband, publicly accused China and several other countries of trying to hijack the climate conference and “hold the world to ransom.”

China's image has also been affected because it executed a British citizen widely believed to be mentally ill for drug smuggling, despite high-level appeals for clemency and calls for the examination of psychiatric evidence.

These are signs that Western countries are losing patience with China. And at a time of global economic problems, there is growing annoyance with China's policy of continuing exports-based growth.

While Beijing is quick to criticize what it calls “protectionism” in other countries, it insists on the right to maintain the value of its currency at an artificially low level, giving itself a built-in trade advantage.

Premier Wen Jiabao said in a year-end interview with the official Xinhua news agency that China “will not yield to any pressure of any form forcing us to appreciate” the value of its currency.

Mr. Obama, during his presidential campaign, had accused China of manipulating its currency, but did not do so after assuming office, evidently hoping to achieve progress with Beijing in other areas.

However, the Obama administration may now be ready to take a tougher stance. Certainly, it is being encouraged to do so.

In a New Year's Day op-ed piece in The New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman declared that China “follows a mercantilist policy” which is, “to put it bluntly, predatory.”

The Chinese currency, he pointed out, is pegged at about 6.8 yuan to the dollar and, “at this exchange rate, Chinese manufacturing has a large cost advantage over its rivals, leading to huge trade surpluses.”

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