January 25, 2002	Friday	Ziqa’ad 10, 1422

BEIJING: US President George W Bush’s visit to Beijing in February initially seemed to have been announced and prepared to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the country, but recent developments show that Beijing has a carefully scripted agenda for the summit.

In a matter of days since the announcement of the Feb 21-22 visit by the US president, Beijing has released a Tibetan scholar who has served six and a half years out of an 18-year prison sentence, launched a fresh attack on its homegrown rebel groups and drawn tacit applause from Washington for avoiding another spy row with potentially explosive consequences for both sides.

Observers believe that by honouring the 30th anniversary of Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to the then-reclusive communist nation with a series of political gestures, Beijing hopes to foster the newfound mutual trust between the two sides and achieve some major domestic gains.

Whether it orchestrated the sensational disclosure that a US-made plane for President Jiang Zemin was found to have been bugged with more than 20 devices or not, Beijing reacted gracefully to ease the possibility of another spy row between China and the United States.

Instead of letting the bugging of Chinese presidential jet become an issue of public outrage, Beijing kept the incident out of the state-owned print and broadcast media. On Tuesday, a foreign ministry spokesman brushed aside doubts that the incident might affect Bush’s visit to China next month.

“I have heard about this but so far I have no knowledge of it and I don’t see any impact of this event on other issues,” Sun Yuxi told foreign media at a regular press briefing here.

To capitalize on Beijing’s graceful handling of such an explosive issue, Sun promptly reminded everyone that “China is a peace-loving country and constitutes no threat to anyone, so it is of no use to bug China.”

This diplomatic turn of events is in stark contrast to Beijing’s reaction to the April 2001 collision between a Chinese fighter jet and a US reconnaissance plane off the Chinese coast.

Then, public outrage overtook foreign policy thinking and forced Beijing to take a harder line against the United States without any evident gain. Many among the Chinese public think that America fears China’s rising power, and thus regard the United States with hostility.

While foreign media reports suggest that Jiang is outraged at US attempts at spying, the fact is that the incident has been kept under wraps since September.

This leads to a conclusion that if Jiang protests about this to Bush in person, the spy plane issue would be used to force a much stronger point about US surveillance activities along the Chinese coast.

American EP-3 spy planes are reported to continue routine missions of surveillance along China’s south and east coasts, despite the collision off Hainan island in April that led to the death of a Chinese pilot and a