U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson returned Friday from Beijing, where he spent two days urging Chinese leaders to reduce their massive trade deficit with the United States. That's a worthy mission, and news reports said he met with some success. But when he settles in back home, he needs to tell his boss that the United States must face up to its own share of the problem.

China runs the second-largest trade surplus in the world, just behind Japan, an achievement that's evident to any American who has shopped lately for tools, shoes, toys, radios, TVs, athletic apparel.

This leads to understandable anxiety among American workers, who find their jobs threatened by Asian imports, and at some point it will boil over into dangerous protectionist sentiment in Congress.

China's habit of intervening in world financial markets to fix its currency well below the dollar is partly to blame for these imbalances: When the yuan is cheap relative to the dollar, Chinese exports are cheap on world markets. Many economists think China should let its currency appreciate by 10 or 20 percent — making its exports costlier and U.S. exports cheaper — and Paulson did the right thing by sending that message to Vice Prime Minister Wu Yi.

But merely blaming the Chinese currency would be misleading and dangerous. Forcing the Chinese to let the yuan float freely in world currency markets, as some trade hawks argue, would open the door to currency speculators and that, in turn, could "trigger capital flight and jeopardize their economy, in view of the fragility of their banking system," economist C. Fred Bergsten warned in testimony to Congress. That's exactly what happened during the Asian currency meltdown of 1997, and major regional powers such as Indonesia, Thailand and Korea are only now recovering.

Americans also need to recognize their own culpability in their nation's massive trade imbalance. The United States has been running large federal budget deficits since 2002; when a nation runs government deficits without offsetting saving in the private sector, it is consuming more than it produces. Imports have to make up the difference.

President Bush — intent on passing, enlarging and extending his series of tax cuts — seems oblivious to the fact that government deficits aggravate trade deficits and undermine international confidence in the dollar. One duty of the treasury secretary is to tell him that — as Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin told President Bill Clinton a decade ago.

To some degree, China is only following the model that Japan used in the 1960s and 1970s: building a strong domestic economy by using the rest of the world as one giant export market. That's not fair, if it means manipulating its currency and closing its own markets to Western competitors.

On the other hand, the emergence of a strong and optimistic middle class across Asia — perhaps 1 billion strong — is one of the world's great accomplishments of the last 20 years. If the Bush administration wants China to act responsibly in the world economy, it has to set a good example.

— Star Tribune (Minneapolis)------------------------------------------Cancer and good news are not often said together, but there was reason to last week as a study found the first sharp decline in decades of breast cancer rates across the country.The drop recorded for 2003 compared with the previous year was steepest among women 50 and older — and a tangible measure of the good that comes from investments in research, by individuals, organizations and the federal government.Most important, though, is the encouraging message the decline sends to women. While the battle is far from over, the more science commits to studying, the closer humanity moves to a breakthrough.Scientists believe, based on research by M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, that the decline is the result of millions of women abandoning menopause hormone drugs. By discontinuing the treatments, experts believe, women cut off the estrogen some tumors use as food.Of course scientists will have to conduct still more research to be certain of a lasting decline and that other factors did not play a role.Still, this first step is promising enough for women to talk with their doctors, and for concerned citizens to appreciate the many life and death reasons why investment in cancer research continues to make sense.

— Detroit Free Press