The Chinese Are Coming

China occupies a strange position in our collective Northwest consciousness. Somehow it's managed to avoid being identified as a potential antagonist in Red Dawn II, and the human rights abuses that we were so concerned about back during that Tianamen Square fiasco seem to have all been a misunderstanding or something. We're smarter than that now. The memo identifying China as the World's Largest Untapped Market has been distributed to just about everyone who has ever sold anything and we've seen the error of our ways. (We've also seen a few Western-style PR campaigns.) Any day now a billion middle-class Chinese will be clamouring for coffee, airplanes and software and Seattle has been working overtime to be in a position to provide them.

To that end, we've managed to score a visit from Hu Jintao, China's president. The cheerleading coming from the daily newspapers would lead one to believe that this is our finest international hour since securing that WTO thing.

Check out the P-I's interview with Gary Locke:

Question: What does Washington stand to gain from Hu's upcoming trip?

Answer: "China has enormous needs," Locke said. "From feeding its people to cleaning up its rivers and streams and its air to providing electricity in rural areas to educating its people and providing health care to its people. We have so many companies and institutions from our colleges and universities to our farms to our architectural engineering firms to our manufacturers to our technology sector that can really help meet the needs of China, raise the standard of living of the Chinese people, and provide jobs for the people in Washington state or throughout the rest of America."