Maybe you haven’t heard, but Google has found a new adversary after vanquishing Yahoo and Microsoft: China’s Communist Party!

Google recently announced (on its official blog no less) that it is threatening to pull out of China. Its public reason is that it has traced hackers, perhaps operating under the support if not consent of China’s Communist Party, attacking its computer systems. The hackers stole not just military secrets but the Gmail passwords, e-mails and other personal information of Chinese human rights activists. Apparently, the computer systems of 32 other companies were compromised as well.

Just last month, China’s government sentenced prominent democracy advocate Liu Xiao Bo to 11 years in jail for “sedition.” Google’s official motto “don’t be evil” has been sorely tested in cooperating with the communist party’s censors on search results.

I tested the censors on China’s most popular search engine, baidu.com. Typing in “Tiananmen massacre,” the first  link is a headline stating “China rights questioned weeks before Olympics.” The next two are random links. Only six Web sites come up and none of them have anything to do with what actually happened. Censorship is real and a necessary part of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt at social control.

It’s too bad we’re missing the bigger picture. In the U.S. media, China comes up when we talk about outsourcing, human rights and our debt.

We owe them hundreds of billions and they make all the stuff we buy. We want China to help prevent Iran from getting the bomb and they want us to do what exactly? Continue what we’ve been doing.

Invading Iraq and fighting a global war on terror (ie. continued U.S. involvement in the Middle East) tied down our time, energy and money. Meanwhile, China’s been  busy harvesting resources in Africa, developing ties to Latin America and Australia and positioning itself as a leader on global climate change.

On the other hand, the smallness of our politics means one of the two major political parties in this country doesn’t believe or want to mitigate climate change.

My 84-year-old grandmother even told me that Scott Brown, the new Republican senator from Massachusetts, once posed naked for “Cosmo.” How silly. Democracy sure looks great when people abroad hear about how petty it can be. This pettiness is threatening to become dangerous as it blinds us to what’s going on across the Pacific.

Well, Google is paying attention. Our foreign policy thinkers  are paying attention. Our politicians are not. Yet, China’s rise is not inevitable nor necessarily hostile to U.S. interests. It has its own problems that are too often ignored by our media.

Last week, I went downtown in Kunming, a city of 7 million people, to see the bustling shopping centers. Multiple malls  seven stories high lined with  restaurants and shops  flanked an enormous concrete plaza. There was everything from an IMAX theater playing “Avatar” to multiple Vero Moda shops. Chinese consumers were funneling into  the Nike Factory Shop from the sidewalk.

And just outside that Nike Factory Shop there lay a man, hairless and sunburned on the ground. He was missing an arm and  was resting  his body on newspaper and a page of text written in Chinese calligraphy. Next to his head lay a paper shopping bag with some Chinese bills that strangers had donated. He was less than 10 feet away from the steps into the store. For me, this jarring juxtaposition painfully illustrates the contradictions bubbling beneath China’s public image.

A population of 1.3 billion living in an area less than half the size of the United States. A minimal social safety net. Glittering cities on the coast and persistent abject poverty in the countryside.   And don’t get me started on the pollution.

Yes, China is really complicated. Pay attention. It’s not just about the cuisine  or Yao Ming.