Americans' always complicated reaction to China -- its enormity, its power and, most poignantly, its potential as a rival on the world stage -- is now reaching a new level of intensity, faced with China's own new economic and political surge.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

Some of that apprehension is justified. There are some truly alarming elements in the current relationship. At the same time, some of it is just cuckoo, not taking into account the limitations inherent in China's own situation that can prevent it from -- in Nikita Khrushchev's words -- burying us.

China is a bit scary at the moment. Last month the city government of Beijing cancelled an order for software from the American firm Microsoft because the Chinese government assessed that Chinese customers were not buying enough Chinese-made software, thus discouraging Chinese production.

Two pieces of this action are scary for Americans. The first is that someone, somewhere in China is looking over the whole Chinese economy and making judgments like that, which are then translated into action.

By contrast, the manufacturing of vaccine against the flu that threatens America annually was left more or less unobserved by the U.S. government until it discovered late in the game that the American firm making the vaccine in Britain had made a mess of the job, thus putting in danger the lives of thousands of Americans.

The second alarming aspect of China's action in the Microsoft deal is that some people in the Chinese government and economy are clearly thinking about the fact that imports of American products that could be made in China cost China something in terms of both technological development and jobs. The American version of how to approach that issue is that Wal-Mart buys as much stuff cheaper from China as it can and American consumers climb all over each other to buy it. Never mind the damage to American companies -- from manufacturers to wholesalers to retailers -- just get it a little cheaper; outsourcing of jobs is not something to think of, unless it's my job that just went away.

Some of the Chinese "threat" is even more concrete and quantifiable. They currently hold some $174 billion in U.S. treasury bonds. Worse, if the Chinese did not continue to buy U.S. debt, the federal government would be in trouble. With a budget deficit this year of $413 billion, it needs to attract $2 billion a day to pay the bills.

The other fact is that, if, by chance, China were to choose this awful moment to seek to do with Taiwan what it has done with Hong Kong and Macao -- eliminating them as a separate entity -- there would be virtually nothing the United States could do about it, stretched as we are militarily in Iraq. Fortunately, it is unlikely that China will do what it could do in that domain because it knows that eventually, for a combination of economic and political reasons, Taiwan will drop like a ripe fruit into its hands. Why raise a terrible fuss by grabbing by force what is going to come to you in any case? The Chinese also have a much longer sense of time than Americans do: 50 or 100 years is virtually nothing when your country has a history 7,000 years long and considers itself "the center of the world."

I could do more "yellow peril" argumentation, but let's look at the other side of the ledger. There are a lot of facts about China that automatically limit what it and its government can ever do. Most of them also are not true of the United States, not serving as internal limitations on American performance and actions.

One is the size of the population of China, which currently stands at 1.3 billion, four times America's some 300 million. On the one hand, they constitute an amazing market for Chinese and foreign goods. On the other hand, the task of providing social services, including education, health care and infrastructure, to a population of that size is numbing in its magnitude and complexity.

A second constraint on China's actions is the complexity of peoples that make up the 1.3 billion. China has throughout its history been troubled by regionalism, reflecting the different groups -- speaking different languages -- that make up what is called "China." In the pre-Communist days before 1949, the country was constantly tormented by the wars and other problems generated by the warlords who ruled the different regions. It is generally considered that the reason Japan rolled over China so easily in the 1930s was divisions among the Chinese that hobbled their ability to defend the country.

The Communist government has striven mightily to smooth over these differences, with some success, but there is still considerable rivalry and lack of cooperation among the different regions of the country, reinforced to a degree by the size and ubiquity of the 2.5 million Chinese People's Liberation Army.

Finally, there is the very basic problem of any growing economy: the distribution of wealth among the population. China is currently growing at 8 to 9 percent a year. It has the full range of wealth represented in its population, from the rural peasant still farming with animal traction as he did centuries ago, to an elite of Shanghai Hiltons who make spoiled American brats look like paragons of enlightened generosity.

So, at the moment it's a gamble: Will China's own internal limiting factors keep America safe from its overtaking and passing us, while -- or if -- we sort ourselves out? I would have to say at this moment that they will, but our own continued relative well-being in that regard will depend to a large degree on America's own ability to clean up its act.