By Tom Plate

There appears to be a kinder, gentler International Monetary Fund roaming the Earth these days.

You may well recall the old IMF. This Washington-based international bailout fund stomped through Asia during the region's fearsome 1997-99 financial crisis, dispensing its billions like a Grim Reaper. IMF kingpins ordered entire national economies to lay off workers, shut down companies, and pretty much accede to whatever Washington demanded.

Anti-Asian fever was then rampant on America's East Coast. The bashing was not confined just to such seriously diseased economies as Indonesia but also extended to Japan, for its economic lethargy and stalled reform. It got so feverish at one point that President Clinton discussed the bashing problem with his top economic advisers and called a halt.

That Clintonian spirit of balm and calm appears to have infected IMF upper echelons these days. In Tokyo recently, its managing director, instead of bashing the Japanese for their currency interventions (to keep the yen cheap and therefore Japanese exports cheaper), praised the government. The current policy, said Horst Kohler, "is pragmatic and helps stabilize the financial system and battle deflation." The Junichiro Koizumi government shelled out almost $200 billion in the last year alone to keep the yen from getting too fat.

The Bush administration has taken a similarly sensible line about Japan's currency interventions. It knows that the Japanese are prudent and can't keep propping up their currency forever.

Instead, the target of U.S. bashing is now China. I recently attended one of those establishment foreign-policy think-tank sessions on the West Coast, and it was all about what China is doing wrong. But what the Chinese are doing to keep their own currency cheap (again, so as to sell exports more cheaply) is little different from what Japan is doing. No matter — the target this election season is China.

The anti-China line will probably heat up into an anti-Asia frenzy during the coming presidential campaign. The complaint will be about the $124 billion trade imbalance the United States had with Beijing last year. All the candidates, including the president, will find this an easy target.

None, however, will bother to make two other points. One is that no one has been putting a gun to American heads to force them to buy all these moderately priced Chinese products. The other is that China is hardly a vast evil trade empire: With many other countries with which it trades, it is running deficits — not surpluses. With South Korea alone, it was many billions in the red last year. For the month of January, China was overall in the red worldwide.

The coming attack on China could not be more ill-timed. The current Chinese government is the best Asia has seen in memory. Of course, the Hu Jintao regime will win no human-rights awards from Amnesty International, but on many other fronts — from education to banking reform to even a budding democratization — it is making a lot of right decisions.

"They are trying to reach out more effectively to the people," said Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew recently in an exclusive interview. "They are out to avoid what might be called the 'black curtain' syndrome, where the official government limo speeds by you with the dark curtains drawn, projecting the unfortunate image of an isolated elite. They are trying to break that down."

Singapore officials have close contacts at the highest levels in Beijing, are frequently consulted by the Chinese government on key issues, including security, and are generally well regarded among China's elite. China, Lee believes, is pretty much on course for further modernization. The current government, he says, is unlikely to derail that with foreign policy adventurism.

Tom Plate, whose column appears regularly in The Honolulu Advertiser, is a UCLA professor and founder of the nonprofit Asia Pacific Media Network. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu.