I’m sorry, but Speaker for the Dead’s comment is really not true at all. The fact that the PRC is a Communist state is perhaps the most overlooked potential irritant in US-Chinese relations. The US-China relationship is nothing at all like the hostile US-Cuba relationship, in which US policy is overwhelmingly based upon the fact that the leader of Cuba is a Communist dictator.
Relations between the United States and China from the mid-1970s to 1989 were characterized by a warming of relations, compared to where they had been. The Soviet Union and China had increasingly terrible relations since the death of Stalin, but by the late 1960s, they were outright hostile to each other. Generally speaking, the US and China reached an understanding that we both hated the Soviet Union, even though there were considerable irritants in the relationship, such as Taiwan. Again, the US for nearly two decades overlooked the fact that China was Communist simply because they were anti-Soviet.
In 1989, Tiananmen Square happened, and things got downright frosty for a period of years. The US response was generally focused around the severe human rights abuses that had occured (and largely continue to occur), rather than the form of the Chinese government.
Since then, it has been a very complex relationship that is cooperative in some ways (US businesses love to trade, the US government has responded with various trade deals, and diplomatic niceties about our countries being “strategic partners” instead of competitors, cooperation on the North Korean nuclear issue); and hostile in others (criticism of China’s human rights, the chance of war over Taiwan, unfair Chinese trade practices, the perception that China seeks to challenge the US superpower status in coming decades, the US spy plane being forced down in China early in the Bush Administration). There’s also a strain on the US side in that Japan, South Korea, and China are often in competition for more diplomatic attention from the US: that’s why senior US officials almost always visit all three countries when traveling to the Asia-Pacific region.
There’s a microchasm of the relationship that probably illustrates things the best: Americans complain that China is stealing US manufacturing jobs, and Americans like to buy cheap Chinese made goods. Conversely, Chinese have a sort of envy for the power that the US wields, but at the same time, often resent American power as well.
I believe it is a much more complex relationship, and general feel-good statements about China (along the line of “the Year of China”) untempered by some criticism probably would not be very well received by the American people, thus are not really in political vogue.
Thinking further about Speaker for the Dead’s comment, there is a fragment of the American population that does get riled up by the “Red Chinese,” and although they are passionate and vocal, they are voices in the wilderness, and their hardline views really don’t have much bearing on the overall US-China relationship.