As Bill Gates and Hu Jintao clink their champagne glasses and the world marvels at the rapid advancement of China, Hao Wu lies in a dingy cell, trapped in the bureaucratic maze of China’s police state, where the arresters answer to no one and justice is carried out at whim.Rebecca MacKinnon, in a splendid op-ed piece in today’s WaPo, looks at this dichotomy. After a harrowing description of the recent arrest (more like a kidnapping) of AIDS activist Hu Jia, Rebecca focuses on Hao Wu.

Hao turned 34 this week. He personifies a generation of urban Chinese who have flourished thanks to the Communist Party’s embrace of market-style capitalism and greater cultural openness. He got his MBA from the University of Michigan and worked for EarthLink before returning to China to pursue his dream of becoming a documentary filmmaker. He and his sister, Nina Wu, who works in finance and lives a comfortable middle-class life in Shanghai, have enjoyed freedoms of expression, travel, lifestyle and career choice that their parents could never have dreamed of. They are proof of how U.S. economic engagement with China has been overwhelmingly good for many Chinese.

Problem is, the Chinese Dream can be shattered quickly if you step over a line that is not clearly drawn — a line that is kept deliberately vague and that shifts frequently with the political tides. Those who were told by the Chinese media that they have constitutional and legal rights are painfully disabused of such fantasies when they seek to shed light on social and religious issues the state prefers to keep in the dark.

Since Hao’s detention, Nina has spent countless hours pleading with police officers for information about his case, location and condition. After a month of getting nowhere, she started to chronicle her ordeal on a Chinese-language blog at http://spaces.msn.com/wuhaofamily . (You can read it in English at: http://ethanzuckerman.com/haowu .) It is a heartbreaking account of how China’s regime eats its young. In her first entry she describes her disillusionment: “the people I dealt with never showed police credentials (despite repeated requests), and never called each other by name. . . . I was angry at myself for my political naiveté, and angry at this place that displayed the police insignia but did not actually ‘Serve the People.’ ”

With Chinese President Hu Jintao in the United States this week, Americans have an opportunity to assess his regime. What is this country to think? On the one hand his government has raised the living standards of millions of its citizens with economic reform and international trade. On the other hand his underlings trample shamelessly on his people’s basic human rights.

Unfortunately, money talks more loudly than empathy, compassion or the urge to see justice carried out. So as usual, I expect there to be some tut-tutting about Zhao Yan and Hao Wu, some more op-eds like MacKinnon’s, and then some apologies to Hu for these bothersome distractions as the dealmakers sit down at the big table to do business. The plain truth is that when it comes to these injustices in China, most Americans simply don’t care, as long as they can get cheap shoes at WalMart.