Zhao Yan should consider himself lucky. After being detained for 21 months without trial, the researcher at the Beijing bureau of The New York Times is expected to be sentenced Thursday, finally. Instead of rotting in jail indefinitely like many others, Mr. Zhao at least will have the privilege of going through a kangaroo court to find out the number of years he’ll be deprived of freedom. Beijing doesn’t send people to trial to acquit them; a trial means a guilty verdict.

Mr. Zhao, a seasoned mainland Chinese journalist who joined the Times in April 2004, was arrested on September 17 the same year. Beijing was upset about a September 7 report in the Times that forecasted, correctly, the retirement of Jiang Zemin, the then Chinese Communist Party chief. Mr. Zhao was accused of revealing this “state secret” to the Times, which has denied that Mr. Zhao was the source of the story.

Prior to the visit of Hu Jintao, the current Chinese Communist Party chief, to Washington in April, Beijing withdrew the charges against Mr. Zhao, raising the hope for Mr. Zhao’s release. However, not only did Beijing not set Mr. Zhao free, but once Mr. Hu’s visit was done, the same old charges against Mr. Zhao were reinstated.

President Bush has raised the case of Mr. Zhao to Mr. Hu, at least three times: when they met in New York last September, in Beijing last November, and in Washington in April. I hope Mr. Bush takes this as a slap on the face. This is how the country America hopes one day will become a “responsible stakeholder” actually behaves.

“When it comes to the fundamental human principles of freedom, liberty and justice, China is in the Dark Ages. Anyone seeking proof of that need look no further than the case of Zhao Yan,” a Times editorial declared on April 18. Mr. Zhao’s case demonstrates “just how far China still has to travel before it can pretend to call itself a just society,” the editorial said. While I’m glad the Times seems to have finally smelled the coffee, it’s still tragic to know the paper once edited by A.M. Rosenthal would need such rude awakenings to see the light.

The Times should have known better, from its own previous experience, if not from simply looking at what’s going on in China. When Arthur Sulzberger Jr. led a Times delegation that included Joseph Lelyveld, Howell Raines, and Thomas L. Friedman to conduct an overall soft-ball interview with Mr. Jiang in August 2001, the only challenging question was, “Unfortunately, The New York Times Internet site is blocked in this country. We wonder why, and how do you square China’s incredible progress with information technology with its practice of blocking some important information sources on the Web, such as our newspaper’s own Web site?”

Mr. Jiang played a yin-yang trick – everything has two aspects, pros and cons. While the Internet can be good, it’s also affected by some “unhealthy things.” He dodged the question with this very interesting answer: “You raised a very specific issue about The New York Times Web site in particular, I cannot answer this question. But if you ask my view of The New York Times, my answer is it is a very good paper. . .”

If I were a publisher, I would have been so embarrassed to have my paper praised by a dictator. Who knows? Perhaps Mr. Sulzberger really took it as a compliment. After the interview, I was told by someone working at the Times that its Web site, considered “unhealthy” by Mr. Jiang, all of a sudden became healthy and was unblocked for a period of time.

With one of their staff facing a long jail sentence and possibly the death penalty, the Times is angry at Beijing. However, the New York Times hasn’t gained its reputation as the No. 1 liberal, and I would add, anti-American, paper in America from nothing. Its subsequent editorial on May 21 showed its true color illustratively: its real enemy remains the government in Washington, not the one in Beijing.

While giving credit to the Bush Administration for making Mr. Zhao’s case a priority, the Times immediately blames the White House for the latest setback. “But some China experts worry that this legal step backward is a one reaction to Mr. Hu’s treatment when he was in Washington,” it said. Mr. Hu didn’t get a state dinner; an announcer called China by the official name of Taiwan; and a Falun Gong protestor heckled the guest. I’m not surprised that the Times could find some panda-hugging experts to engage in the game of blaming America first, but it still startled me when the Times, even now, would call this a “legal step backward” as if there were a genuine legal case at issue and not a political prosecution in reality. Come to think of it, I was naive to expect a paper that considers terrorism a law enforcement issue to have a better judgment.

If the Times can’t even get it right with its own story, how can it expect me to trust what it has to say about other stories in China, or anywhere in the world as a matter of fact?

Mr. Liu, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association and general manager of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily, is a Washington-based columnist.