Following last month's revaluation of the yuan, Washington's China hawks have lost no time in zeroing-in on a new target - the mainland's capital controls.
Their reasoning runs something like this: Beijing's refusal to allow money to flow freely in and out of China is distorting the mainland's interest rates. Because money that has flowed into China cannot drain out again, there is too much liquidity in the Chinese economy.
That over-supply of cash is keeping yuan interest rates artificially low, which gives Chinese companies access to cheap funds and confers on them an unfair advantage in global export markets. Beijing should therefore abandon its controls or face heightened trade friction with America.
This argument is not only dumb, it is dangerous.
Lots of developing economies operate capital controls. In China, although firms are free to buy and sell foreign exchange to purchase imports or to bring home export revenues, they are not permitted to borrow or lend offshore without the permission of the central bank.
Equally, Chinese savers are not allowed to invest abroad and there are restrictions on how much foreign financial institutions can buy in the domestic markets.
There are good reasons for these controls. Although by no means watertight, they help prevent large amounts of money flowing unexpectedly into or out of the country and destabilising the financial system. Chinese officials know just how damaging this can be; the history books are littered with accounts of crises triggered when emerging economies opened up their capital accounts prematurely.
