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For most of my life I've been told that the Chinese represented a dire threat to America. The communists under Mao did kill Americans in the Korean War and they treated their own people even worse. Being a Chinese official during the years after Mao took over wasn't exactly a walk through the park. Even Mao's widow was under sentence of death for awhile.

Then somebody dragged out the ping pong paddles. Seemingly out of the blue, the evil Chinese invited American ping pong players to visit China and bat a few balls around. I doubt that we'll ever know the full story but not long afterward American President Richard Nixon went to China, not to play ping pong but to establish what have proven to be our most valuable foreign connections of the latter half of the 20th century.

I'm as mad at Nixon as you are about Watergate but his opening of relations with the Chinese could make him the greatest president since Abe Lincoln. Even though the Chinese aren't leaning on the Iranians as hard as we would like right now, they are perhaps the most valuable allies we have. A lot of us wondered why President Bush wasn't treating the North Koreans as roughly as he was treating Iran over the nuclear issue but the answer is coming clear. Bush didn't have to. The Chinese were better able to straighten out the North Korean problem and they appear to have done it.

Just last year our granddaughter from Pensacola went through the 12th grade at a high school in Beijing, learning to speak Chinese and rubbing elbows with the local populace. When she picked up her diploma, her parents and her aunt and uncle from Inyokern were there in Beijing, discovering that the inscrutable Chinese are about as hard to figure out as the residents of South Pasadena.

Communists? Are you kidding? Our kids reported that China has become the most fiercely capitalistic place on earth.  The people of China have put away the sayings of Mao and have bought into the good life, western style, in a big way. They still ride bicycles by the millions but now they have to look out for their middle class friends plowing through traffic in their new automobiles.

Where this will lead in the years ahead is unclear but there is a growing suspicion that the Chinese as enemies might have been a lot better than having them as competitors. Although China has extensive coal deposits and a mature nuclear industry, their energy needs are growing so fast that they are nearly as responsible for high gas prices in Tehachapi as the sheiks of Araby. While official relations with China no longer focus on weapons of mass destruction, they are just as heated when it comes to pirated CDs and DVDs. My son-in-law told me that in dealing with the aggressive street merchants of Beijing he became convinced that he could buy any of the latest American movies for next to nothing. It appears that the only place where the Chinese remain heathen is in Hollywood.

I'm not complaining about this and it's not because I don't own any copyrights that are being violated in the far east. Humans are naturally competitive. How much better it is that we compete in selling cars and other consumer goods than in shedding blood. It's turning out that Americans and Chinese are mirror images of each other. I can live with that. The rest we can argue in the courts.