Beijing plans for national greatness. IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY A few months ago that commentators were blithely babbling about how much relations between Beijing and Washington had improved since the start of the Bush administration, which was marred by China's downing of an American EP-3 surveillance plane and the detention of its crew. The conventional wisdom was that the war on terrorism had united the United States and China against a common enemy. This rosy scenario is, unfortunately, being undermined almost daily by Beijing's actions. Consider what the Chinese Communist leadership has done just in the past year: It passed an...