Antonin Scalia has this great observation which is far too often ignored because he rubs 60% of lawyers and 18% of the population at large the wrong way. Paraphrased, it goes something like this: We are very close to unique among nations for how we view our Constitution. The closest we have for a State toast of royalty would be, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Constitution of the United States.” (The presumption of course is that none of President Obama’s more ardent followers is making the toast.) The word “unconstitutional,” with its literal meaning and its suggestion of something fixated between sin, error, treason, and rejection, is America’s unique contribution to the world.

At the heart of Justice Scalia’s observation is the belief that the American view of the world is one in which the primacy of the rule of law is a given. It’s particularly clever because in a world of extraordinary rationalism, scientific reduction, and attempts to model human behavior with mere mathematics, we tend to forget that nations and cultures may have guiding stars other than the mere accumulation of wealth and power — and that sometimes, wealth and power are just the means to achieving those ends.

China’s end is internal harmony. This is not in itself a terribly insightful statement, though you’d never know how obvious this is given how often American policy makers miss it. It’s not that the Han are genetically hardwired to value stability and internal cohesion, any more than Germans are hardwired to be beer-drinking obsessive-compulsives or Americans to be puritanical subsidiarists unduly fixated on legal text. It does, however, mean that the People’s Republic of China’s every move domestic and foreign is aimed at encouraging, maintaining, or salvaging internal harmony. That internal harmony is extremely uneven now, which means that we are missing a fleeting opportunity to unbalance a national rival while we navel-gaze over whether Congress will simply recreate Great Britain’s highly efficient, complaint-free public health sector immediately, or wait a few years to do so.

As anyone who has spent more than a few minutes studying China would know, the Han fascist regime is in a mad dash never before accomplished in human history: World-historical growth, importance, and wealth ahead of incredibly fast aging and population collapse. As added hurdles, they have unrest from the peoples they’ve enslaved, massacred, and oppressed; the collapse of their only real market for the goods they produce (the rest of planet Earth); rising competition in cheap manufacturing from the rest of the world; and a vaguely revanchist Russia facing many of the same problems. If they can accomplish it — and of all the peoples of the Earth, I’d give the best odds on that sort of endeavor to America, the British, and the Chinese — they’ll have accomplished one of the greatest feats of all time.

They won’t accomplish it. But that won’t stop them from trying, in no small part because they must. The Uighur riots of earlier this month (a large enough domestic event to drive Hu Jintao back to Beijing to show domestic strength); unrest from the other ethnic minorities against whom China has practiced genocide in everything but name; the slowed economic growth, which even at eight percent per year is neither sustainable as currently structured nor enough to handle the migrant workers who returned from the coasts months ago; and continued unrest from Han left out of or wounded by the corruption and despotism of the Chinese economic miracle are all weighing on China at the worst possible time.

More dangerously, the very method on which the PRC has relied to avoid another Tiananmen and students symbolically breaking bottles — a program of propagandistic inflammation of racial pride, international assertion, and stoking the wounds in the Chinese psyche from colonialism a century dead — is in danger as well, because its dreams of blue-water power projection are being noted and matched by India and Australia, two powers not inclined to allow unfettered Chinese hegemony, and because — in spite of this Administration’s view of how Asia should look — much of the continent is not excited by the idea of a return to the bad old days of the Ming Dynasty, and they’re starting to share this impression with each other.

Beijing is not a monolith; in some crucial ways, it is less a monolith than Washington, D.C. But its leadership has a core set of concerns, not least of which is keeping the country from devolving into open chaos and anarchy until it is too old to do so. Its leadership is also canny, technocratically capable to brilliant, and inclined to take the long view. Some of the PRC’s leadership believes it needs to turn inward to arrest the incredible income disparities that have developed between rural and urban, country and coastal, favored and disfavored; some are pushing to continue the colonization of Africa as a first priority to continue to extract natural wealth and slave labor; some are even lobbying to end the one-child policy, hoping against all evidence to the contrary that the cultural norm they’ve created of “one child or fewer equals wealth and status” can be reversed before China leaps into European aging demographics. Every last one, from Hu to Wen Jiabao outward and down, came of political age during Deng’s regime, saw the chaos of Tiananmen, and saw how, for all of his well-publicized faults, Jiang Zemin created both coerced and willing social harmony following the Massacre. Every last one has as his or her primary goal continuing China’s rise (peaceful or not) and pushing through the demographic turmoil of an aging population and far too many men without wives to what they are certain is a harmonious future on the other side. Every foreign policy act, every domestic act, every round of talks over trade, every nominally private company with a PLA officer or two at the top’s every act has these goals in mind.

And if we wanted to, we could take advantage of it.

Many pixels have been dyed in the cause of lamenting that China variously “owns” us, is in the catbird seat because they own so much of our debt, is the future of Asia, etc. Horsehockey. The debt issue is fallacious on two fronts: First, were our current administration not absolutely dedicated to enabling Old Democratic impulses toward spending trillions we do not have on social safety nets designed to impoverish everyone but the wealthiest and Senators (but I repeat myself), this would be a non-issue; cutting off that tap would stanch the bleeding nicely. Second, and more importantly, we’re in a classic Mexican standoff with China: They dare not dump our Treasuries, we dare not let them, and each has a more or less incredible threat (can you say “monetize”?) that’s frightening enough on its own that neither side is likely to blink in the foreseeable future. Moreover, all the recent Chinese bluster about a new global currency — a classic case of long-term ground-clearing — is meaningless until the extremely long term, as my colleague Francis Cianfrocca has so ably demonstrated. While the idea of China’s inexorable rise to regional hegemon is less laughable than its rise to world hegemon — the former is comparatively easy in a continent with a fertility rate among its powers hovering at around 1.1 children per woman — that’s only by way of comparison. In any meaningful sense, a country that has too many young men and not enough babies poses a regional, but not global, threat, and that only for the twenty years it will take the young men to be geezers like yours truly.

With all of the problems China is facing, now is a wonderful time to knock their legs out from under them for our own good and for Asia’s. Cutting or at least reining in government spending is vital — much of that stimulus money is actually going to help the Chinese dig out of their recession, and the toys we will buy over the next twenty years for medical care are overwhelmingly produced in Chinese coastal factories — but it’s only a first step. Public shame — a deeply underused tool that our caught-in-the-19th-Century diplomatic corps is incapable of understanding — over its ongoing atrocities can cause China to lose face both externally and, more importantly, internally. Anything that drives Chinese attention inward is axiomatically a good thing. Explicit defense agreements with other regional powers — India comes to mind, as they won’t be a nation of senior citizens in twenty years — ringing China will also play on critical Chinese fears.

All of this can be done, if done right, without firing a shot; without jeopardizing the trade we desire and China needs to keep it from boiling over into another dynastic change; and while not making the Democrats and amoralists who overwhelmingly populate the State Department unduly nervous. It almost certainly won’t be done by this Administration — better that a million Uighurs should be tortured to death than that we fail to have a comprehensive national health care plan — but the problems China presents will still need to be managed whenever the next President enters office. The only question is whether that President will understand what this one claims to, but does not: Different people respond to different kinds of pressure and ideas. Understanding that and taking advantage of it is the first foreign policy duty of any American President.