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One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Petursdottir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy C.E.O. for Kaupthing in London. “The financial culture is very male-dominated,” she says. “The culture is quite extreme. It is a pool of sharks. Women just despise the culture.” Petursdottir still enjoyed finance. She just didn’t like the way Icelandic men did it, and so, in 2006, she quit her job. “People said I was crazy,” she says, but she wanted to create a financial-services business run entirely by women. To bring, as she puts it, “more feminine values to the world of finance.” Today her firm is, among other things, one of the very few profitable financial businesses left in Iceland. After the stock exchange collapsed, the money flooded in. A few days before we met, for instance, she heard banging on the front door early one morning and opened it to discover a little old man. “I’m so fed up with this whole system,” he said. “I just want some women to take care of my money.”

Thirteen years ago in Beijing, you spoke eloquently about the duty of all governments to respect the fundamental human rights of women and men. Respect for human rights, you said, means “not taking citizens away from their loved ones and jailing them, mistreating them, or denying them their freedom or dignity because of the peaceful expression of their ideas and opinions.” In recent years, however, human rights concerns have been pushed progressively further to the margins of the U.S.-China relationship. The Chinese government’s growing financial, diplomatic, and military strength, coupled with its hostility to reforms that challenge the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power, make China a difficult country in which to effect change. But the advancement of human rights in, and with, China is arguably more central to U.S. interests than ever before. Press censorship in China makes it possible for toxic food and public health crises to spread globally. Suppression of dissent removes internal checks against environmental damage that has global impact. Abuses of low-wage labor implicate international firms operating inside China and compromise goods that come into the United States. The government’s control of mass media and the internet allow it to stoke nationalist anger against the United States in moments of crisis. The export from China of internet-censoring technologies and its provision of unconditional aid to repressive regimes increases the United States' burdens in fighting censorship and human rights crises worldwide. As much as the Chinese government appears to resist outside pressure to improve its record, experience suggests that it does respond to such pressure.

As the world’s attention turns to Buddhist protests against Chinese rule and cultural domination in Tibet, another neighbor of China is protesting in a less peaceful manner. In Mongolia, anti-Chinese sentiment has taken a nasty turn. The neo-Nazi group Blue Mongolia, for example, shaves the heads of women caught sleeping with Chinese men. “It is for their own good,” says Gansuren Damdinsuren, a Blue Mongolia board member.  “A small nation can only survive by keeping its blood pure.”