It is the Golden Rule. He who has the gold, rules. China has the gold and we are going hat in hand to get them to buy our T-bills so we can fund our government. Obama is now facing that reality.
China has their own problems. They have roughly 20 million unemployed rural bumpkins in their cities looking for work, and with the economic downturn in the US, there is no work to be had. We aren’t buying as much Chicom junk as we did.
Jintao recently got all his military together and told them it was their duty to obey the Communist Party no matter what. I suspect the leadership fears massive civil unrest and the need for a military smackdown.
The Chinese have to buy our T-bills in the porkulus package if there is a significant probability it will get us buying their cheap junk again. Otherwise they have to trash their economic model and go back to the era of the Cultural Revolution.
We have strange co-dependent marriage with China; neither party really loves the other but neither party can afford a divorce.