Helene Cooper writes in The New York Times:

[I]n the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular.

The article proceeds from there, actually giving the impression that a couple of people from the U.S. movie scene convinced the Chinese government to change its stance. Sure, the two have done some effective advocacy on the issue. Farrow started a campaign to brand the Beijing Olympics as the “Genocide Olympics.” And she pressured Spielberg, who’s advising the Chinese government on something or another related to the games, to pressure Chinese officials by saying he might compare to a Nazi propagandist if he didn’t speak up. (He did—in a letter to President Hu.)

The trouble is that the article doesn’t mention the dozens of campaigns and websites from elsewhere on Earth devoted to the same thing. Besides, the article says Farrow got on board last month. What about the Washington Post editorial from December that suggested that U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson bring up what the headline called the “genocide olympics” issue? Oh, and then there are the French presidential candidates calling for their country to boycott.

How issues involving China will play in the 2008 U.S. presidential election is yet mostly uncharted territory, but Senator Hillary Clinton revealed revealed some China talking points this week after the Shanghai market’s burp heard round the world.

Sounding bells of economic populism, Clinton told CNBC the United States faces a “slow erosion of our economic sovereignty.” She sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, saying the stock market turbulence “underscores the exposure of our economy to economic developments in countries like China. As we have been running trade and budget deficits, they have been buying our debt and in essence becoming our banker.” Her letter went on to warn the government’s economic czars that “if China or Japan made a decision to decrease their massive holdings of U.S. dollars, there could be a currency crisis and the U.S. would have to raise interest rates and invite conditions for a recession.” (A nice sound bite from the letter: “The writing may not be on the wall, but yesterday, the writing was on the Big Board.”)

An unnamed “Democratic strategist not currently working for any of the presidential contenders” (well, not that he admits) told MSNBC that China may be a liability for Clinton:

“Arguably, no candidate may be more vulnerable on China, and Wal-Mart than Senator Clinton,” he said. Why? Because she once served as a member of Wal-Mart’s board of directors and because, as president, her husband persuaded Congress in 2000 to award China with permanent normal trade relations status and smooth the accession of China to the World Trade Organization.

…

But if the mood of the electorate in 2008 is anti-China, other Democratic presidential contenders would have their own China history to contend with: as senators, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden all voted for the Clinton administration’s China trade deal.

So what’s the policy message? How is the U.S. to get out of this bind? Clinton’s letter to Bernanke and Paulson and her public statements (as far as MSNBC and I have found) have been short on details, but she did endorse a plan by “Senator Dorgan and then Congressman Cardin that sounds an alarm bell when US foreign owned debt reaches 25 percent of GDP or the trade deficit reaches 5% of GDP. It would require the administration to develop a plan of action to address these conditions, and report their findings to Congress.”

OK great. The solution is to require someone else to come up with the solution. Sloughing off responsibility from Congress onto the executive branch may look good when you’re running for reelection as a senator from the great state of New York, but people concerned with her China background are going to need more from Clinton if she wants to run the executive. Not that anyone else is giving us much to go on so far. Not to worry! We’ve got 10 more months of this clown show before the primaries.