Every time China's Communist dictatorship gets a new public face, he is toasted as the great moderate hope.

Every time China's Communist dictatorship gets a new public face, he is toasted as the great moderate hope. That hope is inevitably betrayed. Deng Xiaoping liberalized China's economy only to crush students with tanks at Tiananmen. Jiang Zemin was a more boring version of the same: He understood the value of markets, but cared not the least for freedom of thought and expression. And now we have Hu Jintao, under whom China has issued dark threats to Taiwan while cracking down on Internet speech, on Christians, on journalists. It is worth pausing, when we can, to mention the names of victims. In that vein, consider Zhao Yan, a Chinese New York Times researcher who was jailed eleven months ago for leaking the "state secret" that Jiang Zemin had rejected Hu Jintao's recommendation of a Chinese general for promotion. For this "crime," Zhao is held incommunicado, having been denied a court hearing, visitation rights, and medical care. One would like to be optimistic about his chances, but history counsels otherwise.