The big news on the foreign policy front this morning is that that the Communist Chinese have massed up to 150,000 troops of the Chinese “People’s Liberation Army” on the Chinese border with North Korea. We gather this from a dispatch of the Agence France-Presse, which cited Hong Kong’s Sunday Morning Post and Hong Kong’s Chinese-language Sing Tao Daily. “Large troop movements and new military barracks have also been seen in the border towns of Hanchun, Tumen, Kaishan, Sanhe, and Baijing, while air force jets have frequently been seen flying over the capital Yanji,” about some 25 miles from the border, the report said. To put the matter in perspective, 150,000 is 20,000 more troops than America now has in Iraq.

The report as quoted by the AFP says that China’s deployment is aimed at deterring Pyongyang’s nuclear build-up and to stifle mounting violence from rogue North Korean soldiers. Apologists for Communist China will no doubt credit Beijing for being “helpful” in pressing North Korea to curb its nuclear ambitions. But such “help” hasn’t produced much in the way of concessions from North Korea. Pyongyang was last seen bruiting that it had nuclear weapons and that it was ready to test them. Some of those concerned about the human rights situation in North Korea are so desperate that they actually think the Communist Chinese have a role to play in this regard.

The Bush administration’s policy so far with respect to North Korea has been to press for a multilateral solution that includes China, South Korea, Russia, and Japan. The South Koreans have so far been even less helpful than the Chinese. While the Chinese are massing troops, the South Koreans are busy booking flights on the new commercial tourism trips to Pyongyang. There, the Chosun Ilbo reports, for $1,900 they can enjoy a four-night, five-day package that includes a trip to the birthplace of Kim Il Sung.

All this — most ominously China’s troop movements — is happening at a time when refugees from Communist North Korea are fleeing into China. Both the Chinese and the South Koreans are maneuvering to avoid being deluged by a flood of such refugees. The South Koreans actually beat up a human rights activist trying to get radios to the North Koreans by using balloons to loft them over the border. The Bush administration has failed to respond in a public way to the refugee crisis. But the movement of Chinese troops suggests that the communist mandarins in Peking comprehend that the hunger of the North Koreans to escape to freedom is a volcano of which we are just seeing the early tremors. Those who covered Asia during last generation of the Cold War remember how fast, and in what numbers, refugees can burst out of communist countries. This is a situation made for American leadership.