Treasury Secretary Paulson is in Beijing with a star-studded cast: the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke; U.S. trade representative, Susan Schwab; four other Cabinet secretaries, and a multitude of agency heads and lesser officials. Their collective goal is to put trade relations between America and China on a more sustainable basis.

Even before the last meeting concludes and the final toast is made, we know what will happen. Beijing will make minor concessions — “deliverables” in Washington parlance — Mr. Paulson will declare that important progress has been made, and not much will change in the unbalanced trade relationship between America and China. Little will be accomplished because Americans fundamentally misunderstand our relationship with the Chinese.

Let’s start with our classic mistake. “China cannot be pressured,” an American political commentator resident in Beijing, Laurence Brahm, wrote this week in the South China Morning Post. According to this view, held by many, we should never upset or confront the Chinese. This perception, however, is ludicrous. China’s leaders are not emotional children. On the contrary, they are ruthlessly pragmatic autocrats. After all, they have run the world’s largest authoritarian state for more than a half-century.

Yet Secretary Paulson, considered an experienced “China hand,” has bought into the enduring fallacy that one must always be patient and nice to Beijing’s leaders. “There is a tendency in Washington to want immediate answers,” he said on Monday as he sought to lower expectations of his visit. Yet America has been engaging the Chinese leadership since the end of the 1970s, and it’s about time for American policy to bear fruit. Merely getting the Chinese to talk to us — after more than three decades — is not enough.

There is a second reason why our China policy is ineffective. Apparently, the world’s sole superpower believes the Chinese hold all the cards. Americans point out, for example, that Beijing owns about $340 billion of America’s Treasury debt. As Senator Clinton asked earlier this year, “How do you get tough on your banker?” Yet China’s ownership of our debt confers little actual advantage because of the ways global markets work.

Suppose China does the worst thing imaginable: It tries to dump all its American debt. This is not such a big deal as everyone assumes. After all, the Chinese are going to have to buy something — as a practical matter, euros and yen. The values of those currencies would then go through the ceiling. The Europeans and the Japanese, to stabilize their currencies, would then have to buy … dollars. In short, there would be a great circular flow of cash in the world’s currency and debt markets.

There would be turmoil in those markets, but it would not last long, a calendar quarter at the most, perhaps even only a few weeks. And we would end up in the same place we are now, except our friends would be holding our debt instead of the Chinese. Global markets are deep and flexible and can handle just about anything.

Our trade deficit with China has grown 121-fold in less than two decades thanks to Washington’s spectacularly unsuccessful policies. If nothing else, this growing imbalance means we need to put our commercial relations with Beijing on a sounder footing.

So what specifically should America do? The first order of business is to start filing cases at the World Trade Organization against China for its discriminatory regulations, import restrictions, local content rules, and massive subsidies. Chinese enterprises have been stealing intellectual property for a quarter-century, and yet we cannot bring ourselves to file a complaint.

More importantly, we should treat the Chinese as they treat us. If they impose an onerous rule on our banks, we impose one on theirs. If they unfairly subsidize their manufacturers, we enact a countervailing duty. There is nothing wrong with reciprocity. If we adopt a sensible approach, the Chinese would sit up, take notice, and begin to dismantle their WTO-noncompliant rules. Until we do that, they will continue to laugh at us.

Over time, we have created a set of perverse incentives. The Chinese break their trade promises, and we do nothing. So they continue their bad behavior, but we reward them. In these circumstances, why would they ever comply with their obligations?

Instead of our sending a delegation to Beijing, the Chinese should be sending one to Washington to explain why we should continue this unsustainable relationship. Unfortunately, we have everything backwards.

Mr. Chang is author of “The Coming Collapse of China.”