“THE LONGEST JOURNEY begins with the first step,” goes an old Chinese proverb. In the unlikely event that the Chinese authorities’ decision to allow the country’s currency to appreciate slightly against the dollar is indeed the first step on a long journey to a floating exchange rate, it is only “a baby step,” according to the most prominent critic of China’s trade policy, New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

True. But even so it accomplished its immediate political objective, cooling some of the anti-China, protectionist sentiment that has been building in Congress as a result of America’s massive trade deficit with China, the attempt of CNOOC to take over Chevron, and the release of documents in which the Chinese lay out plans to use economic weapons to weaken America militarily. Add in a Pentagon report documenting the growing military might of China, and the expansion of its geographic reach by purchasing refueling planes, increasing its arsenal of mobile ballistic missiles, and building space-surveillance systems, and you have a heated political atmosphere that the Chinese find worrying.