In his first public appearance, even before the welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People, Bush attended a service at a state-sanctioned Protestant church to send a message about free expression of faith in a country that harshly smothers it. The president has been offended by the recent harassment of religious people trying to practice their faith without state approval at underground churches, aides said.
"My hope is that the government of China will not fear Christians who gather to worship openly," the president told reporters outside Gangwashi Church, a modest brick building and one of a handful of official Protestant churches in Beijing. "A healthy society is a society that welcomes all faiths."
It's a nice gesture, but only a gesture. As far as efforts go, it's laughable. China knows its religious oppression faces no meaningful opposition from the United States. With that market potential they could burn and eat the Christians with impunity. It'd be like a greedy lawyer getting rid of a rich yet troublesome client that wants to pay quadruple the ordinary fees. It just won't happen. The U.S.'s obsession with furthering the free market won't allow it. At some point, it's conceivable that the free market itself will undermine China's oppression, but I'm skeptical. The Communists seem to have appropriated much of the free market's workings without losing their ironclad grip. I honestly don't understand how they're doing it, and maybe they aren't (the Soviet Union, after all, looked reasonably solid to people like me in the 1980s).
Addendum
A WaPo book review/essay discusses a new book that might shed a little light on the China quandry:
America's post-Civil War transformation pales alongside the changes underway today in China -- a manufacturing powerhouse grafting market forces onto a communist system. As James McGregor puts it in One Billion Customers, "China is undergoing the raw capitalism of the Robber Baron era of the late 1800s; the speculative financial mania of the 1920s; the rural-to-urban migration of the 1930s; the emergence of the first-car, first-home, first-fashionable clothes, first-college education, first-family vacation, middle-class consumer of the 1950s, and even aspects of social upheaval similar to the 1960s." . . .
Through case studies of six disparate business ventures, McGregor illustrates the dangers and allure of the Chinese market. Especially compelling are Morgan Stanley's effort to build China's first joint-venture investment bank and the emergence of Caijing, a crusading business magazine.
