China's attempt to take over the U.S. oil company Unocal is a major test for Congress on Sino-American relations. Congress' answer so far -- harsh but toothless resolutions, hearing after hearing, and a tight focus on the narrow complaints of the rival Unocal bidder, Chevron -- deserves an "incomplete" at best.

		Kevin L. Kearns, a former Foreign Service Officer with extensive Asia experience, is president of the U.S. Business and Industry Council. Alan Tonelson, a research fellow with the Council, is the author of "The Race to the Bottom."

The state-owned Chinese oil firm CNOOC's heavily subsidized bid for Unocal should be blocked, both to limit the Chinese government's role in an already heated global scramble for energy and raw materials, and to preserve free competition within the U.S. economy.

Yet anyone truly concerned about the implications of the CNOOC bid -- as opposed to grandstanding or serving Chevron's corporate agenda -- also needs a politically realistic strategy for changing the forces and decisions that made it possible, and that will produce more Chinese economic gambits and military adventurism in the future.

This means changing America's fundamental China trade and investment policies -- which are creating the massive Chinese trade surpluses and therefore the wherewithal to finance Beijing's often troubling ambitions. And given the Bush administration's stubborn support for the China trade status quo, Congress needs to force a change by making a major political statement -- namely, rejection by the House of Representatives of the Central America Free Trade Agreement, or Cafta.

Cafta narrowly passed the Senate but faces its decisive test in the House. The deal deserves defeat on its merits alone. Allying the United States commercially with six impoverished Western Hemisphere micro-economies, Cafta is incapable of promoting significant U.S. export growth. And it will actually weaken the Central American economies by pushing them toward greater reliance on exporting apparel -- a losing proposition due to the mammoth, price-destroying, global garment surplus being engineered by China and other Asian super-exporters.

Just as important, Cafta has become a referendum on recent U.S. trade policies that have produced massive U.S. deficits, rising Chinese surpluses, and a resulting cash hoard Beijing can now draw on to buy valuable U.S. and other foreign assets. It is also a referendum on the Bush administration's claim that free trade dogma is all the China policy America needs -- that it will eventually turn the People's Republic into a docile, democratic trading partner.

Instead, these auto-pilot free-trade policies have poured literally hundreds of billions of dollars into China's coffers and needlessly hastened its development into a formidable economic, political and military rival.

A Cafta victory in the House would be touted by the Bush administration and its outsourcing multinational allies as an endorsement of today's China and other giveaway trade policies which have focused on sending vital American production capacity, jobs, and R&D facilities to low-wage countries like China, rather than on opening foreign markets for U.S. exports.

In particular, winning Cafta will strengthen the White House's conviction that for all their hue and cry, Congress and voters don't care much about outsourcing issues or the very real strategic threat posed by China.

Even the new China trade bill just introduced by Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Phil English, explicitly intended to buy the Cafta votes of representatives seeking cover on China, simply continues Congress' overall record of meekly acquiescing with the China and trade policy status quo. An open-ended hodge-podge of studies, bilateral meetings, and other window-dressing, it gives far too much discretion to both an undeserving Executive Branch and to the very Chinese government that has violated countless international agreements.

Worse, multinational lobbyists have decided to let the House play out this charade till the end, knowing that they can kill the new China bill in the Senate. And nothing about the scattershot response to the Unocal deal signals new Congressional seriousness on China, either.

Since the president will stick to his guns, House members that genuinely want new overall trade policies and an effective new China policy must take the initiative. They must prove that these administration approaches are anathema to voters by killing Cafta.

Far from risking a new era of protectionism and increased U.S.-China tensions, this House-launched policy revolution would put the dangerously imbalanced U.S. and world economies on a more solid footing, and replace Washington's piecemeal China tariffs with carefully formulated strategic curbs on Beijing's power.

House Members, in other words, clearly have the power to do more than talk about changing U.S. globalization and China policies. The Cafta vote will show how many possess the courage to do so.