Red carpet and a hot reception: now Premier heads for hinterland

THE White House knows how to throw a dinner party, and it seems to save its most lavish for those occasions when a Chinese leader is in town.

Only 18 months after President Jiang Zemin passed through, Washington rolled out the plushest red carpet for Premier Zhu Rongji on Thursday night. An A-list of Chinese-American celebrities, including actress Joan Chen and skater Michelle Kwan, rubbed shoulders with more than 200 members of the capital's political elite to the rarefied strains of a cello recital by Yo-Yo Ma.

But as Mr Zhu tucked into a main course of Oregon salmon on a bed of caramelised fennel, his table adorned with spring bouquets personally designed by First Lady Hillary Clinton, the mood in the Chinese delegation was not especially buoyant.

His eight-day trip only two days old, Mr Zhu already knew that all that lay in front of him were diplomatic niceties and photo opportunities, while the Holy Grail he was expected to take home to his people seemed to have been snatched from his grasp.

This is a different Washington to that experienced by Mr Jiang in 1997. Premier Zhu walked into a town whose leaders were in no mood to give favours.

The administration's gung-ho spirits had been awakened by the current military venture in Yugoslavia, and its brittle relationship with Congress was giving it little room for manoeuvre with a Beijing regime under attack for everything from political repression to nuclear espionage to (in some critics' eyes) its own form of ethnic cleansing in Tibet.