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Frank Ching

The visit by US President George W. Bush to Beijing this week, the third such visit of his presidency, is likely to focus on economic issues. The president will seek to reduce China's trade surplus - estimated at US$200 billion this year - by getting it to import more from the United States.

He will also call for action on intellectual property rights, increased market opening and currency reform. China and the US recently signed an agreement under which Beijing will limit its textile exports for the next three years.

What Mr Bush may be too diplomatic to bring up, however, is an even more pressing issue: the need for China to demonstrate that it will not be a bully when it becomes powerful, as it undoubtedly will.

The criticism directed at China by the US sometimes seems unending. In July, the Pentagon issued a report on the Chinese military in which it said: 'Secrecy envelops most aspects of Chinese security affairs.

'The outside world has little knowledge of Chinese motivations and decision-making and of key capabilities supporting PLA [People's Liberation Army] modernisation.'

The following day, Beijing  said it rejected the suggestion that its 'normal national defence-building and military deployments' constituted a potential threat to US forces.

Last week,  the US State Department released its annual report on international religious freedom, which said that China's 'respect for freedom of religion and freedom of conscience remained poor', and once again designated China as a 'country of particular concern'.

The next day, the Foreign Ministry responded by accusing Washington of 'interfering in China's internal affairs'.

That same day, a bipartisan advisory body, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission,  issued an annual report in which it urged imposing immediate, across-the-board tariffs on Chinese imports to pressure Beijing to do more to strengthen the value of the yuan, as well as other punitive measures.

In response, a Chinese spokesman, while acknowledging that the two countries 'do not always see eye to eye', asserted that 'the enhancement of co-operation between the two countries serves [the] fundamental interest of both peoples and benefits regional and global peace and stability'.

And so it goes. The US thrusts, China parries.

One of America's chief players in China policy, Deputy Secretary of State Robert  Zoellick, delivered a major address in September  in which he  pointed to China's rapid rise and posed the question: How will China use its growing influence?

China wants to convince the rest of the world that its rise will be peaceful. One Chinese thinker, Zheng Bijian , chairman of the  China Reform Forum, is credited with articulating the concept of 'China's peaceful rise' - a theme that Chinese officials have been reiterating for months.

This month Mr Zheng  delivered a speech of his own. He asserted that the Communist Party's 'core principle' was to 'seek international peace, seek domestic harmony and seek reconciliation across the Taiwan Strait'. But those, of course, are just words.

It is not enough for China to say that its rise will be peaceful. It will also be necessary to demonstrate this through action.

China can do much more to establish its peaceful intentions. In particular, it would help if China were to operate in a more transparent manner, especially where its military spending is concerned.

It would also help if China were to demonstrate that it respects human rights, both those of its own people as well as those of others. If China does these things, it will go a long way to reassure the rest of the world about its peaceful intentions.

Frank Ching is a Hong Kong-based writer and commentator



Worried about a bully