Over the weekend, as America braced for war, Communist China gained final admission to the World Trade Organization, effective early next year.  As the dead were being pulled from the wreckage of the symbol of American business in New York, US Chamber of Commerce chairman Steve Van Andel, responding to China's new status as an equal partner in the free world, and certainly speaking for businessmen across the nation said, "I am like a racehorse waiting for the gate to open."  China is already our biggest trading partner, flooding our markets with everything from toys to electronics, and doing so at prices that reflect the slave labor they use in many of their factories.  They have addicted us to their cheap goods, like the British addicted them to opium, and without them our retail sector would collapse.  But this is not enough.  Admission to the WTO will open the way for American companies to sell much more of their goods and services in China, and even though most of China's nearly 1.3 billion people live in abject poverty, there is still a market there of 300,000,000 souls with what we would call "middle class buying power;" a market bigger than that of the United States itself, and one that has the CEO of many a company lining up at the gate behind Mr. Van Andel. And so countless American companies, especially in light of domestic economic woes,  will undoubtedly rush into China and become dependent on the business they do there to survive.  So the puppet masters in Beijing are about to hold all the strings of the marionette that is the United States economy, and marvel that Marx and Lenin and Mao were right: the greed of capitalism really will make it give itself up to utter destruction.

     During the Clinton years, with a relationship warmed by illicit campaign contributions, American technology of all kinds, but especially military, flew across the Pacific into waiting Chinese hands.  Missile guidance systems, high speed military computers, you name it and during the 90's the Chinese got it. And this was just the legal stuff.  While the inticing soap opera of the Clinton sex scandals played itself out to a titillated nation, hardly any real import was placed on the disappearance of the defense plans for the country or the plans for our electromagnetic pulse weaponry, among other things.  The fact that Chinese operatives had compromised the security of our nuclear research facility at Los Alamos was met with blank stares and shrugs by most of the American people, since it didn't interrupt football or make the price of gas go higher.

     I was recently asked, "When did China start being our enemy?"  I replied, "When did they ever stop?"  As the rest of the world celebrated the so called "death of communism" at the fall of the Soviet Union, the Marxist Socialist regime of Red China was cruising along just as ruthlessly as ever, and proved it in 1989 at Tiananmen Square.  In death, Mao Tse Tung has become the Confucius of Chinese Marxism, with Chinese schoolchildren reciting from The Little Red Book the way American schoolchildren used to recite from the Bible. If anything, the cult of Mao controls China more completely today than when he was alive, for in death there is no separation between man and myth, and the myth takes on a life of its own.  His presence has become almost Bhudda like, and to the young he is "Grandpa Mao" and now, with the cult of ancestor worship focused completely on him, the cultural revolution is complete.

     Well, almost.  There is still one nagging cultural hangover from the days of western occupation that Chinese communism cannot rid itself of: Christianity.  Over 200 million Christians live in China, more than any other country in the world.  And in the midst of the worst persecution in the world, the faith flourishes and grows, and more will come to know Jesus Christ in China today than will be put to death for professing their faith in Him.  Missionaries risk their lives smuggling Bibles and radios in to our brothers and sisters, and shortwave beams the gospel into every corner of the country.  To the Chinese government, Christianity is a creeping cancer, eating away at the very bones of their carefully constructed  Marxist utopia, and they will strike it down internally and around the world before they let it weaken and destroy them: Like it did the Soviet Union.

     So when you see Osama Bin Laden on TV remember this:  Osama Bin Laden does not have nuclear missiles targeted on US cities, but China does.  Osama Bin Laden has not wrapped his economy in a strangle hold around that of the US economy, but China has.  And Osama Bin Laden does not have the resources to destroy and occupy the United States, but China does.  Who supplies Bin Laden and the other terrorists and the radical Moslem states with state-of-the-art military weapons?  China does.  So when TV ponders just who might be behind the terrorists, don't let them kid you:

     They just don't want to show you the dragon that lurks behind the curtain.