Last week, American politicians had ample reason to be angry at China. On Sunday, more than 600 police and paramilitaries descended upon unarmed peasants in southern China, opened fire and killed two farmers and wounded at least 18 others. The farmers had gathered peacefully to protest city and township corruption. Then, on Wednesday, a Beijing factory worker named Chi Shouzhu was arrested as a pro-democracy “counter-revolutionary.” He will be imprisoned not for inciting pro-democracy demonstrations—not even for promoting democracy—but for printing out information from a pro-democracy website on a friend’s computer.

It is no surprise that American conservatives were huffing about China. They called for China’s normal trade relations status to be revoked. Some members of Congress even called for punitive sanctions against China. But the reactionary conservatives in Washington were livid not because peasants in Jiangxi Province had been gunned down, nor were they concerned for poor Chi Shouzu. Instead, they were angry that Chinese authorities had deprived an American of sleep.

The nerve of those people! Waking up an American pilot in the middle of the night to ask him questions about a crash that had killed one of their pilots. How dare they!

I do not mean to trivialize the U.S.-China spyplane standoff. I know that there was more to this kafuffle than China’s uncharacteristically humane treatment of the 24-member crew of the damaged jet. In addition to submitting our men and women to a nine-day “ordeal,” they also kept our plane.

The fight for the spyplane has elicited a new round of censure from Washington, and has brought relations between the two countries to levels of frigidity unheard of since the pre-Nixon era. On one hand, it was refreshing to see that our government could get tough with China—that unrestricted trading access to the world’s largest market does not rule out justified retaliation. On the other hand, it is unfortunate that we were retaliating for none of the right reasons.

Where were our Congress members when Chi Shouzu was arrested? Actually, it is unlikely that most Americans even heard of Chi Shouzu—arrests like his are so regular that his story did not even make Western newspapers. “Dissidents” like Chi Shouzu are held without trial, beaten and imprisoned. The authorities provide no official explanation for their arrests and their relatives are hardly ever informed of their loved ones’ unfortunate fate.

And it gets much worse. When township officials apprehended 30 year old Zhou Jiangxiong in May 1998, they hung him upside down, repeatedly whipped and beat him with wooden clubs, burned him with cigarette butts, branded him with soldering irons and ripped his genitals off. What did this man do to deserve such a heinous punishment? According to Amnesty International, he was tortured to death because the officials were trying to make him reveal the whereabouts of his wife, whom they “suspected of being pregnant without permission.”

In China, torture is institutionalized and an everyday part of law enforcement. The government-initiated “strike-hard” anti-crime campaigns have given tax collectors, judges, court clerks, party leaders and other officials a free reign on using torture to extract confessions and information from “criminals” like Zhou Jiangxiong. These practices are particularly prevalent in restive Tibet and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, where ethnic minorities and their families undergo various forms of cruel and unusual punishment if they are even suspected of being involved in separatist activities.