While Mr Clark deliberated quitting the race, half a world away his steering committee chairman appeared resigned to the inevitable. 'Kerry is going to be the nominee,' Mr Kantor said.

At times, it was easy to imagine that Mr Kantor was the candidate. During a brief interview squeezed into his schedule, he was - as they say - 'on message', using the word 'jobs' 16 times and making two references to President George W. Bush's 'jobless recovery'.

'Remember that even though the stock market is going up and inflation is still under control, [the recovery] has only affected a certain slice of the American electorate,' Mr Kantor said. 'The great bulk of Americans are worried about losing their jobs or have lost their jobs. We have nine million unemployed in this jobless recovery.

'Generally speaking, people are paying more for college costs and more for local property and sales taxes. Over the past three years, average income is down in the US and poverty is up.'

As his remarks suggest, Mr Kantor is something of a politician - albeit of the behind-the-scenes variety.

He is, in many respects, typical of an entire class of lawyers, lobbyists and fund-raisers in Washington who - while not aspiring to office - raise money for candidates, run their campaigns and serve in their cabinets.

As Mr Kantor put it: 'I haven't left politics. I just left the government.'

Mr Kantor was a confidant of Mr Clinton, the most gifted politician of his generation, and it appears that some of the former president's magic rubbed off.

After establishing that his interviewer was from Boston, for example, Mr Kantor recalled his years there in the early 1960s as a naval officer and noted approvingly that it is a town 'where politics is still a full-contact sport'.

'I love Boston,' he said. 'It's a great place - a great city. I have a lot of friends there.'

Mr Kantor also referred to his many friends in Hong Kong, which he visits two or three times a year. Like a front-line politician, one gets the feeling that he has lots of good friends in lots of cities the world over.

But if Mr Kantor is a classic example of a modern-day democratic warhorse, he is unlike most of his Washington counterparts in also having a well-honed international perspective and longstanding ties to Hong Kong and the mainland.

This perspective and his connections date back to his days as trade representative, where he was deeply involved in the transformation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade into the World Trade Organisation, and to a lesser extent China's WTO accession negotiations.

'That was brutal,' he said of the accession negotiations, although most of the heavy lifting was done by his successor at the Office of the US Trade Representative, Charlene Barshefsky. By 1996, Mr Kantor had moved on to become secretary of commerce.

His familiarity with American domestic politics and international trade gives him a unique perspective on one of the more curious aspects of this presidential election season - the emergence of China as a local, economic issue in the US.

'All politics is local' was the famous observation of Tip O'Neill, the former US House of Representatives speaker and an old-school Boston-Irish politician who was an adept practitioner of the city's 'full-contact' politics Mr Kantor so admires.

What decides American elections, Mr O'Neill believed, are close-to-home, bread-and-butter issues. That conviction was also at the root of the strategy - 'it's the economy, stupid' - that propelled Mr Clinton to victory in 1992.

In 1992, however, China was not a local, economic issue in American politics. It was a political and human rights issue. When candidate Clinton railed against 'the butchers of Beijing', he was tapping an emotive chord that registered more with liberal-minded Asian studies undergraduates than with union members.

Weighing the dubious domestic political benefits of Mr Clinton's initially hard-line China policy against the complications it was to cost him in the early years of his presidency, it is remarkable that he bothered to make an issue of it at all.

'When President Clinton got into office and recognised both the delicacy and complications of the US-China relationship, he became very sophisticated very quickly,' remembers Mr Kantor.

'In 1994 he de-linked human rights from trade. When asked about that [Mr Clinton] gave what I thought was not only a charming but also a very honest answer - 'Things are more complicated when you get into office'. And I think every American president finds this to be so.'

But 12 years on, China has indeed become a local, economic issue in the minds of many Americans.

'People have connected, fairly or unfairly, our huge US$125 billion trade deficit with China - and outsourcing and jobs with China,' Mr Kantor observed. 'For a large slice of American voters, China has become symbolic of our failure to pay attention to jobs for Americans.

'We're going to have a very close election,' he added. 'I don't know who's going to win. But it will be very close and very difficult - and China will be one issue ... people will criticise the [Bush] administration for not doing more to protect us against this huge and growing behemoth in world economics [that] appears to be drawing our jobs and hurting our economy.'

Considering the not insubstantial role that the Clinton administration - and Mr Kantor as trade representative and commerce secretary - played in paving the way for globalised trade and the reintegration of China into world trading patterns, was it not a bit rich for him and other Democrats to now be criticising the consequences for political gain?

Mr Kantor, sounding like a candidate again and perhaps mindful of his good friends in Hong Kong, qualified that he was not criticising China or globalisation per se.

'The Chinese government really responded in a very positive and effective manner to signing on to WTO obligations,' he said. 'I might have some concerns over the failure to implement some of those obligations. But the fact is we've made tremendous progress and China deserves a great deal of credit for that.'

He said he disapproved of the Bush administration's failure to help communities deal with the dislocations caused by globalisation.

'In the long run trade is a win-win situation,' he said. 'It is not a zero-sum game. But in the short run some people get hurt. The question is how do you deal with that in the short run. You shouldn't stop building a rules-based trading system. That's in everyone's interest.

'The challenge for us is - and for everyone in their own country as you move forward with rules-based trade - to deal with the dislocation which occurs as a result.'

'Some people will lose their jobs in the short run. We didn't do enough and we still don't do enough in protecting individuals who lose their jobs ... and protecting communities that lose major industries. If you do that, you will in some ways create credibility for trade which we have to have and which we don't have enough of.'

Ultimately, the problem for the Sino-US relationship in this election year is that it is extremely complicated - and complicated subjects do not get a fair hearing in a political arena where every instinct is to simplify and exaggerate.

'If you associate a large trade deficit and China with the jobless situation [in the US], then clearly someone is going to take political advantage of that,' Mr Kantor said. 'I'm not suggesting it's fair or unfair, I'm just suggesting it's the reality of where we are ... [and] the reality of where American politics is going to be this year.

'Trade policy always suffers during an election year,' he added. 'Trade has never been popular with the greatest trading nation on Earth ... a third of the US economy - a US$11 trillion economy - is now tied up in trade. Yet the US public for historic reasons believes trade is not in our interest because we've given away our markets and we don't require others to play by the same rules.

'That came out of the second world war when we did give away our markets to Japan and Europe to build their economies and we didn't require them to play by the same rules we did. That interesting historic hangover is still there, and it makes a difference politically.'

Biography

Mickey Kantor, 64, is a Washington-based partner at the international law firm of Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw. A confidant of former US president Bill Clinton, Mr Kantor was the national chairman of Mr Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and later served as United States trade representative and secretary of commerce.

As trade representative from 1993 to 1996, Mr Kantor played a key role in securing congressional approval for the North American Free Trade Agreement and the establishment of the World Trade Organisation.

Mr Kantor is a native of Nashville, Tennessee, and graduate of Vanderbilt University and Georgetown Law. He passed through Hong Kong last month for a private speaking engagement in his capacity as an adviser to communications consultancy Fleishman Hillard.