In the last few days, I’ve seen Chinese agents overtake Islamic terrorists as the villains on the TV show “24” and heard a woman at the fish counter at Guido’s, our local gourmet market, say, “It’s not from China, is it? I don’t want anything from China!” With the press surrounding the Vice Premier Wu Yi meetings in Washington DC last week with U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Americans’ worries about China are becoming much more visible — though not necessarily reasonable. But that’s often because we get only half the information we need from the press, and most of us just don’t know enough ourselves about China. (After all, how much did you learn in school about China? Can you visualize a map with London, Paris, and Berlin? How about Beijing, Xi’an, and Urumqi? How many Americans have heard of the Pearl River Delta? And that’s just geography.)

This makes it all the more important that Americans get the facts, before politicians’ rhetoric and media sensationalism lead us onto a confrontational path that won’t help us economically or build a more peaceful world for our children.

A perfectly timed and much-needed event is taking place this week, on 31 May, that deals with just this challenge. The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations is sponsoring, with World Affairs Councils across the country, a 30-venue CHINA Town Hall, a “national day of programming that gives Americans in 30 cities the opportunity to hear directly from policy-makers and specialists about these issues and the implications for U.S. policy and their own communities.” There is a great roster of speakers. This is a wonderful chance to stimulate informed discussion across the country, and I’m especially looking forward to seeing the kinds of questions raised in different places.

Here’s a related op-ed from Sunday’s St Louis Post-Dispatch, “China trade benefits our national, and St. Louis, economy”:

One widespread myth is that China is a major economic threat to the U.S. While the movement of some manufacturing to China has created economic dislocations in some U.S. communities, the Chinese economy is also providing extraordinary opportunities for American businesses and workers and lowering the cost of living for all Americans.