August 9, 2007 (LPAC)--On Friday, July 27, Lyndon LaRouche reported that China was soon going to take very strong actions, actions which would shock the United States, in retaliation for the attitude of the U.S. Congress displayed in two recent bills. One was H. Con. Res. 136, passed by unanimous voice vote in the House on July 30, which would abrogate the U.S. agreements with China which bar the highest-level Taiwan officials from visiting Washington, DC. The other was Sen. Max Baucus's (D-MT) S.1607, with 13 cosponsors from both parties, which passed the Senate Finance Committee at about the same time, and will come to the Senate floor after the recess. This is an elaborate bill which would slap penalties on China for the supposed "misalignment" or undervaluation of its currency. Such penalties range from anti-dumping penalties, to opposition to China in the WTO and IMF, all  the way to prohibitive tariffs against all Chinese exports to the U.S.

The threat of retaliation which LaRouche warned of was not long in coming. Writing in today's electronic Daily Telegraph, journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard retails a very specific threat from two high-level Chinese officials: Xia Bin, finance chief at China's Development Research Center, and He Fan, an official at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Both threatened that China might begin to dump some of its more than $900 billion in U.S. bonds, "which might lead to a mass depreciation of the dollar," said Mr. He.