Change Travels Trade Pathways Huge Stakes Culture Accompanies Commerce. So Do Opportunity And Hope For Chinese Workers.

Suppose your neighbor neglects his dog and leaves the poor thing outside on a chain, to howl and bark at all hours of the night. How could you get your neighbor to treat the dog kindly? By blocking his driveway, cursing into the phone and turning all the other neighbors against him? Or by cultivating a civilized relationship?

Foreign policy is even more complex than individual human relations, but similar principles can apply.

As Congress debates China’s trade status, there is good cause for Americans to shudder at China’s current conduct - and there is good cause to work at communicating, rather than polarizing.

This year’s debate will flare over China’s human rights abuses, including the persecution of Christians, and with partisan fireworks over Chinese gifts to Clinton’s re-election campaign. Clinton, like presidents of both parties, supports continuation of normal trade relations - with good reason.

There are huge stakes in U.S. trade with a quarter of the world’s population, including Chinese demand for Boeing planes, Microsoft products and Northwest wheat. Critics sneer that greed and campaign money have bought out U.S. support for liberty. But economic isolation will not make a proud nation with a 5,000-year history bow to U.S. wishes. Have trade restrictions brought freedom to North Korea, Cuba and Iraq? There, as in China in the years before Nixon, isolation has worsened internal oppression.

The best weapons in the arsenal of democracy are not nuclear bombs or tariffs. They are information and trade. The Soviet empire died as word of democratic movements and Western commerce infected the populace with dissatisfaction and hope. Electronic media, including the Internet (which is now spreading into China), hastened the Soviet collapse. Now, those media could carry news that American schoolchildren are boycotting Chinese goods to support jailed Chinese Christians.

Today in Tiananmen Square, site of bloody repression in 1989, the Golden Arches rise. There is more than meets the eye in Big Macs and other U.S. commodities. Culture accompanies commerce. So do opportunity and hope for Chinese workers. Already they are longing for freedom as Russians did. Capitalism is a form of freedom and freedom is infectious.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view see headline: Adopt hard line despite soft money

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = EDITORIAL, COLUMN - From both sides CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board