ongress is set to vote on a bill establishing “permanent normal trade relations” between China and the United States. Opponents have assembled an impressively wide-ranging coalition including labor unions, human-rights activists, Christian conservatives, and defense hawks. What they have not assembled is an impressive argument against open trade with China.

Their complaints about China are certainly well grounded. China has made menacing noises and gestures toward our ally Taiwan. It violates its subjects’ religious and political freedoms, sometimes murderously. Its one-child policy, including forced abortions, is brutal. Its leaders regularly express resentment of American power. It is also true that the Clinton administration’s policy toward China has been willfully blind about these grim realities, subordinating both moral and strategic concerns to commercial ones.

Obviously, China’s behavior needs changing. The question is whether blocking normal trade relations with China will improve that behavior. As Owen Harries has recently observed, China’s behavior was far worse than it is now when America tried to contain and isolate the country. The period from 1949 to the early 1970s, he writes, “was one of the most disastrous not only in Chinese history but in all of human history: a ruthless tyranny prevailed, millions of Chinese were killed by the regime or died because of its insane policies, obscurantism ruled, the economy was reduced to a shambles. Internationally, China actively supported subversion and insurrection throughout its region, fought a war against India, and even tried its hand at intervention in Africa.”

Since then, trade has facilitated an enormous rise in living standards and personal freedom for ordinary Chinese. This rise is not nearly enough to make China a just society; but it is already enough to make the analogy to the Soviet Union pressed by China’s American critics risible. The examples of North Korea and Cuba do not suggest that a continued refusal to trade with China would have led to similar results.

Under the terms of the present deal, China agrees to cut tariffs and restrictions on American agriculture, industrial products, banking, insurance, telecommunications, and movies, and to make other economic reforms. In return, the United States merely accepts China into the World Trade Organization and gives up its annual review of China’s trade status. Opponents of the deal say that in giving up that annual review we are forfeiting our leverage — never mind that this review has never once led to revocation and that the opponents’ own argument, that China has been getting worse and not better, suggests that this “leverage” has not achieved much. Besides, a commitment to free trade with China does not preclude a more hardheaded policy on the defense of Taiwan, the export of militarily sensitive technology, and so on.

A vote for normal trade relations is a vote to reduce the power of the Chinese state. It is an action that both our allies in Taiwan and the most well-intentioned members of the Chinese government hope we will take. We should.