The heat is on the Chinese government to do something about its yuan problem.

The 8.3 solution – the rate at which China’s currency is pegged to the American dollar – has become intolerable to the panic-stricken governments of America and the European Union in the face of soaring Chinese imports. Put aside for a moment the likelihood that a stronger yuan will benefit other low-cost producers – the Philippines, Malaysia, Pakistan – at the expense of China without creating one new manufacturing job in America. Our elected representatives never let bad economics interfere with what they think is good politics.

The Senate is currently considering legislation that would slap a 27.5% tariff on Chinese goods unless China moves to a more “flexible” currency regime within six months. (Flexibility, it should be noted, is limited to one direction when it comes to the yuan: up.)

At the same time, the American textile industry has petitioned the Bush administration to impose caps on textile imports from China. As part of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, “China agreed to let WTO members re-impose quotas if the import surge caused a market disruption,” says Daniel Ikenson, a trade policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

At the start of this year, the last vestiges of a decades-old quota system for textiles were eliminated. American apparel imports from China soared 62% in the first quarter, according to a Commerce Department report. The department now releases preliminary data on textile and apparel imports on a biweekly basis, well ahead of the monthly trade report, “allowing decision makers to more quickly analyze the impact of imports on the U.S. market,” according to Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.

Sound familiar? Back in 1999, steel imports were a hot-button issue. In response to pressure from the highly protected steel industry in search of more protection, the Commerce Department agreed to release steel import data three weeks prior to the trade data, giving new meaning to the notion of politicized data.

Three years later, President Bush imposed tariffs of up to 30% on imported steel products. It was billed as “relief” to steel workers – arguably it served as insurance for Mr. Bush’s re-election. (The steel-producing states just happened to be key swing states.)

Like the steel industry, protecting the domestic textile industry ends up doing more harm than good. It strives to help a small group (textile producers) at the expense of a big group (textile consumers).

If consumers have to pay more for underwear, shirts, and slacks, they’ll have less disposable income to buy toasters, blenders, and vacuum cleaners. Reduced demand for those products translates into reduced output, hiring and profits.

And it’s not even clear that the domestic textile industry benefits. If China’s imports become more expensive, either through tariffs, quotas, or a stronger yuan, it will just “shift the sources of imports” to countries like the Philippines, Mr. Ikenson says.

America has no comparative advantage manufacturing boxer shorts and cotton dresses. No matter how strong the yuan, “sneakers for the new millennium” is not going to become a campaign slogan.

America does have a thriving textile industry making so-called “smart” fabrics, with “higher-value added applications in the auto, aerospace, furniture and medical industries,” Mr. Ikenson says.

If displaced textile workers really want to point a finger, they should be griping about productivity, not China.

Between 1980 and 2000, productivity doubled in the textile industry, according to Mr. Ikenson. That means textile manufacturers produced the same output with half the number of workers. The goal should be to achieve the same efficiencies in the next 20 years, as painful as it may be for redundant workers.

The textile industry has an even longer history of protection than the steel industry.

“One of the first acts of the first congress of the United States was to impose tariffs on imported gloves, hats and clothing,” Mr. Ikenson writes in an op-ed that first appeared in the Asian Wall Street Journal.

That was in 1789. America was an agrarian economy.

Today the average tariff on clothing and shoes is 11%, “almost six times higher than the average tariff on everything else,” Mr. Ikenson says. “America’s status as an economic superpower does not hinge on its ability to produce socks.”