The restoration of military ties between China and the United States is expected to be one of the first significant developments to follow President George W. Bush's mission to Beijing today.
A senior Pentagon official will shortly hold his own series of meetings with Chinese military officials, US sources said. There will also be more high-profile sessions on missile proliferation.
Peter Rodman, Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs, is the most senior US defence official to visit Beijing since the Hainan spy plane stand-off last April effectively froze military relations.
Mr Rodman is expected to confirm an early date for the resumption of annual defence consultative meetings and to formally invite to Washington military intelligence chief Xiong Guangkai, Deputy Chief of Staff of the PLA.
That gesture will be accompanied by two other significant developments: fresh invitations to Chinese military officials to visit US defence colleges and US agreement to allow mainland observers to watch its annual Cobra Gold exercises in Thailand in April. Cobra Gold is traditionally the largest US exercise in Southeast Asia, and allows its forces to work with traditional allies such as Thailand, Singapore and Japan.
'There is a sense that the time is right to allow concrete developments to take place,' one Pentagon official said. 'This is not a sudden embrace . . . There is still a good deal of caution on both sides but it is ultimately a positive development.'
The careful language reflects considerable suspicion among Republican hawks in the Pentagon of China's weapons programmes and its military build-up. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has described China as a potential rival, while a major defence review he authorised issued a thinly veiled warning that Beijing could prove a significant future threat to US interests in the Asia-Pacific region.
