While the public yawns, the United States Congress continues to spend thousands of man hours and millions of dollars of taxpayers' money on dishing dirt on China's alleged attempts to buy influence through political donations.
This column has already discussed the illogicality and unlikely naivety of such tactics on the part of Beijing officials, and noted that those public yawns are emanating from the fact that citizens are well aware that so many other foreign states - from Taipei to London - do the Washington cash dance so much better.
It now also needs to be said that the Chinagate probe is proving to be a massive red herring, deflecting members of Congress' attention away from a far more aggressive and efficient China lobby much closer to home: corporate America.
Any China-watcher in Congress worth his salt - and it sometimes seems that there are pitifully few - knows that Beijing has never had any need to dip into its foreign exchange reserves to influence the outcome of votes on, to quote the best example, Most Favoured Nation status, because big American businesses, aided by the US-China Business Council and the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office's army of lobbyists, have been happy to pay for the effort themselves.
But now, almost without being noticed, the big corporations have once again managed to concentrate immense power into winning friends and influencing people on an important matter of Sino-US trade. This time, however, it is not merely a question of helping the administration convince Congress to maintain the status quo; it involves seducing the White House into a major - and politically risky - policy shift.
The issue is whether President Bill Clinton should make a certification that China has stopped exporting sensitive nuclear technology to rogue states such as Iran, thereby allowing him to give the go-ahead to US power generation companies to make nuclear power deals with the mainland. Despite predictable State Department-speak that the US 'is not there yet' on giving Beijing this coveted blessing, it is by now clear that the agreement is all but a fait accompli, and that President Jiang Zemin will have it to take home with him from his American trip next month.
Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, who yesterday was hammering out more details of the agreement with Madeleine Albright in New York, has been making public noises since the beginning of the year that the commencement of US-Sino nuclear energy co-operation was top of Beijing's wish-list, but it has only recently become clear why the White House felt so compelled to bring it to fruition.