From a Los Angeles Times editorial:
CHINA IS AN EASY TARGET for our economic grumbling. It is ruled by a Communist Party. Its currency, the yuan, does not float freely. It often looks like a monolithic machine, with factories of assembly-line workers churning out low-cost goods to fund its march toward world domination. It has about $800 billion in foreign reserves stashed away.
A popular item in the “blame China” basket is our trade imbalance, and a chorus of howling will no doubt be renewed in Washington now that Beijing has announced that its trade surplus with the U.S. grew considerably in 2005, to $114 billion. The U.S. Commerce Department, when it submits its own numbers, is likely to say the true deficit is closer to $200 billion, as it includes exports through Hong Kong.
