CAMBRIDGE, England -- Among U.S. President Bill Clinton's wilder statements on China were those he came up with when recommending that Congress pass the Permanent Normal Trade Relations Bill. The bill, which Congress passed last September, was a necessary precondition for the United States' support of China's accession to the WTO.

Even by Clinton's standards, the language was flamboyant and exaggerated. The freer trade that China would have to engage in after accession would, he said, "unleash forces that may hasten the demise of the mainland's one-party state." He went on to say that, since accession would involve liberalization in the area of information technology, "in letting our high-tech companies in to bring the Internet and the information revolution to China, we will be unleashing forces that no totalitarian operation can control." Cuban leader Fidel Castro must be wondering if he did the right thing in taking Cuba into the WTO in 1995 now that he knows that it was just a U.S. plot to throw him out of office.

One has to wonder what Clinton believed the Chinese leadership would think when they read this speech, as they assuredly would have done. Did he expect them to withdraw their application for membership of the WTO or to continue with what they were being told was an act of political suicide? Actually, they probably had a good laugh.