John Fugh, a retired major-general in the US army and co-chairman of the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American lobby group, said: 'From a US point of view, a lot of people feel they cannot tolerate the rise of China.'

The study advocates a simultaneous clampdown on Chinese access to 'open source' - but sensitive - documentation, and expansion of such resources as the Chinese-language materials at the US Library of Congress.

For business, it declares the need for a nationwide registry of transactions with China, as though investing in China was the beginning of a slippery slope leading to the theft of technology by Beijing.

In language that is sometimes laughable and at other times downright scary, the US-China Security Review, released in Washington on Monday, calls on the US to get to know China better to fight Chinese manipulation of the media that presents the US in a bad light.

Both the congressional study and the Pentagon's annual report on Chinese military power released last Friday portray an aggressive Chinese intelligence-gathering operation that makes use of nearly 60,000 students, as well as scholars, diplomats and China-related companies.

The view of a 'China Inc' embodied in the report has parallels with US views of Japan as a threatening monolith a decade ago.

But at least one member of the commission disavowed himself of its recommendations. William Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, wrote: 'It is ironic that the report implicitly criticises the Chinese for viewing the US as a hegemon. At the same time, it presents a view of US interests in Asia that can only be described as hegemonic.'

Analysts say the reports are riddled with inconsistencies, yet may help fan public anxieties about China that have both ethnic and political dimensions.

Dr Eden Woon, director of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce and a former policy adviser to former defence secretary Dick Cheney and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: 'If you hold the thesis that China is very big and up to no good and getting bigger by the day and becoming a threat, you don't want to feed it. The danger is that the thesis will become more and more influential and affect politics in Beijing and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.'

For Chinese-Americans, the worry is more direct. 'There's a tendency to view Chinese-Americans with suspicion, as though your ethnicity is deeper than your loyalty to the US,' said Mr Fugh. 'There's a frenzy over here. They always want to look for somebody to beat up on, and now China is the one.'

Experts dismiss the conclusions Chinese students and scholars are a major threat to US security.

'Paranoia is the order of the day,' says Dan Grove, director of Hill and Associates and a former FBI station chief in Hong Kong. 'A lot of what we did couldn't have been done without the patriotism and brilliance of Chinese-Americans. It's really very complex. One of the problems with Congress getting involved is that it really doesn't help the internal security of the United States.'

The commission's recommendations for monitoring campuses would set US-China policy towards student exchanges back 25 years, to a time when the Carter administration decided US security interests would be best served by exposing upwardly mobile Chinese to the US as much as possible.

The controls on US companies engaged in business with China are also unworkable, according to Bob Kapp, president of the US-China Business Council. They involve a federally mandated corporate reporting system to include initial investments, any technological transfers or co-operation and the impact on job relocation and production capacity resulting from investments in China.

'One of the themes that pervades this report is China is a secretive place and the US is an open place and that the balance needs to be redressed,' Mr Kapp said.

Perversely, if the US took up the recommendations, it would have to create a licensing bureaucracy similar to the one China is trying to streamline under pressure from the World Trade Organisation.