Josh Marshall says it’s imminent — and strongly implies we’ll be seeing the whole sad story soon on 60 Minutes! Fingers tightly crossed. Marshall also provides a good follow-up here.

Not much we don’t know already, but a decent overview of the escalating tug of war.

Leftie writer Matthew Yglesias, in NYC to cover the DNC, bumped into some protesting Falun Gongers last night, and I thought his description was interesting.

I cruised by the park in a spirit of complete churlishness, hoping to find some mockery-worthy protestors. Instead, I found a very affecting display by Chinese-American practitioners of Falun Gong, trying to bring attention to the intense repression faced by their co-religionists in the People’s Republic. In addition to placards and signs, they had several live, posed scenes of Falun Gong members being tortured (sorry, “placed in stress positions”) by the Chinese security services, with handcuffs, cages, fake blood, and all the other trimmings.

This is protest as it should be — dramatically calling attention to an issue that people don’t think about nearly as much as they should. That many people disagree with George Bush’s policies is, at this point, obvious. That the government of China is in the midst of a massive, brutal, nationwide crackdown against a group whose only crime is independence from the regime (they weren’t even engaged in active political opposition until the state came after them) is not.

The Falun Gongers weren’t big on providing a U.S. angle to their story, but promoting human rights in China — never a big priority for the American government — has dropped even further down the list as an unintended consequence of the Bush administration’s approach to the war on terrorism. On the one hand, we’re collaborating with China in a joint effort (with Russia) to prop up a series of secular Central Asian dictatorships run by old hands from the Communist era. This has involved, among other things, our giving American assent to the dubious Chinese contention that the government’s crackdown on groups campaigning for the rights of Sinkiang’s Muslim population is primarily a counterterrorist effort.

On the other hand, our own adoption of “stress positions” as a tactic of counterinsurgency warfare has tended to take the heat off China for its use of similar tactics against domestic political opponents.

Colin Powell, who’s been basicallly running China policy while Don Rumsfeld handles the Middle East, bragged a few months back in a Foreign Affairs article (unfortunately not online) that U.S.-China relations have never been better. Sadly, he’s right.