On previous occasions, the previous Chinese dictators (sorry to use such a non-PC word) made token "human rights" gestures on the eve of the presidential visit like the release of some dissident whose arrest was especially notorious. Not Hu Jintao! Not a single token "human rights" gesture! Condi Rice offered a "brilliant" interpretation:

I expect that this leadership will understand [when?], as the former leadership did, that these are issues of concern to the president, concern to Americans, and that we'd keep pressing on human rights.

Can you imagine how the dictator (excuse me!) Hu fears Condi's "pressing on human rights"! We'll "keep" it! Surely Hu is scared to death! He will replace his dictatorship with "freedom and democracy"!

Incidentally, speaking shortly before to the Washington-based Center of Strategic and International Studies, Shintao Ishihara, Governor of Tokyo, said that "Eastern countries"-Japan, Australia, India, and South Korea-believe that the U.S.-led war in Iraq has pointed to the U.S. weakness even in low-tech warfare. Mr. Ishihara said that U.S. ground forces are "extremely incompetent."

You can imagine how scared Hu was by Ms. Rice "pressing on human rights."

Another remarkable detail in the report of the New York Times attached to its four photographs in color, illustrating President Bush's exit:

Mr. Bush, as he has through much of his trip to Asia, continued to focus attention on Iraq: Meeting with reporters, he talked at length about the arguments that have consumed Washington in his absence, saying that members of the House or Senate who oppose his approach to Iraq. . . .

China is a geostrategic tiger as compared with Iraq, a local gnat, as I wrote way back in 2002. Now, Mr. Bush's head was, on 11/20/05, in the tiger's maw. But "his thoughts continued to focus" on how to defeat the gnat.

In contrast to the New York Times, I do not have in China newspaper correspondents about whom the Chinese dictator will think twice before arresting them if they have said something that is not, in his opinion, politically correct. So I have to conceal the names of my correspondents, who on 11/20/05 reported to me the success in China of Eric Drexler, the American founder of nanotechnology, to whom the U.S. Congress has not allocated a cent for the Foresight Institute he founded in 1986. Why this scorn? Drexler's book of 1986 contains a chapter entitled "Engines of Destruction" about nano superweapons, making nuclear weapons obsolete.

Some U.S. businessmen in nonmilitary (commercial) fields of nanotechnology, who have been receiving allocations from the U.S. Congress, have been afraid that if Drexler's military warnings are taken seriously, the attempt to develop molecular nano weapons as a deterrent ahead of China will take a lion's share of congressional nanotechnological allocations. Hence Drexler began to be personally denigrated in the United States as a charlatan who invented the possibility of nano weapons. Just as Einstein invented the possibility of nuclear weapons in his letter to Roosevelt in 1939? Oh no! Einstein was a scientist of genius, of course! As every reference book suggests today! But Drexler did not receive even a Nobel Prize! As one of his American detractors put it, his theory of molecular nano weapons is only good to scare little children!

On the other hand, Drexler's book of 1986 is on websites in China, and on 11/20/05 one of them [oursci.org] posted an article in Chinese one paragraph of which reads, in translation into English, as follows:

This book is the masterpiece of K. Eric Drexler, father of nanotechnology. It was first translated into Chinese and was authorized [!] by the author [!] to publish on the Internet. Originally published on Knowledge of Ships Tribunal [the Military section of Sina.com, one of the largest Web portals in China], it was authorized by the translator to publish on oursci.org.

The what-is-nanotechnology page of nanovin.com eulogizes Drexler and all his disciples and associates and comes out against his American detractors.

The ultimate step for Bottom-Up [a phrase derived from the talk of Richard Feynman in 1959] Nanotechnology is called "molecular nanotechnology," or "molecular manufacturing," which has been brought to the forefront by the researcher K. Eric Drexler. True molecular factories are envisioned, capable of creating any material through a process of precisely controlled exponential assembly of atoms and molecules. When one realizes that the totality of our perceptible environment is constructed of a limited alphabet of different constituents (atoms), which give rise to creations as diverse as water, diamond, or bone, it is easy to imagine the nearly limitless potential which molecular assembly offers.

Some partisans of a more conservative vision of Nanotechnology contest the feasibility of molecular manufacturing, and thus hold a conflicting long-term view to that of Eric Drexler, the foremost proponent of molecular manufacturing theory. It is important to keep this dissention in perspective however, because most of the researchers involved feel that the maturity of Nanotechnology is a positive development. . . .

Says the Chinese website:

To try to suffocate the development of this great post-industrial revolution currently taking shape for extremist ethical reasons, or for anti-apocalyptic prudence, would be a grave error in strategy, because more than ever world competition will continue to develop, and a new nanotechnological superpower may appear, notably in Asia.

That is, the new nanotechnological superpower will be China, a country in Asia!

The Chinese website recommends 5 websites in the field. The first is Drexler's Foresight Institute. Then follow two Chinese website (nanovip.com and nanotech.now). The fourth is CRN. Few Americans know that the acronym means "Center for Responsible Nanotechnology," founded by Drexler's associates. The final listing is "Howard Lovy.blog."

I know Lovy because we met at a Foresight Institute conference last year. But for those Chinese to know him! This is really "the United States in China"!

Not that the Chinese search for molecular nano superweapons began on 11/20/05. On June 15, 1996, the Chinese magazine "National Defense" carried an article entitled "Nanotech Weapons in Future Warfare" by Major General Sun Bailin of the Chinese Academy of Military Science. No U.S. military man has ever published such an article, though surely the United States is less secret, or more "transparent," than the dictatorship of China.

So, while President Bush spent the Sunday of 11/20/05 in China, talking about Iraq and, if we are to believe Condi Rice, "pressing on human rights," time was not wasted by those Chinese who were looking forward to the Chinese superweapon that Drexler described in 1986, the year when Program 863 was founded in China to develop post-nuclear superweapons in seven fields. Today 50 percent of Chinese students study nanotechnology, while the figure for the United States is 5, the population of China exceeding that of the United States more than four times. It seems that instead of any progress in human rights in China, about which the Governor of Tokyo said, "I believe such predictions are totally wrong, Condi Rice will discover the Chinese ultimatum to the West and its allies, confronting them with (nano) annihilation, and they will be lucky if they surrender unconditionally.