WASHINGTON: As China prepares to greet President George W. Bush during his state visit to Beijing next week, the country’s government and intellectual elite are deeply split about to deal with the world’s only superpower and handle relations with the global community, experts on China-US relations say.

“A rising China will be a somewhat uncertain and perplexed China,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University who has written extensively about the internal debates about China’s role in the world. “Consistent and clear national strategies are still missing” from the national leadership.

China’s foreign policy, Shi added, is “inconsistent and fragmentary” and usually reflects the “vicissitudes of immediate world events” rather than a long-range view of the world.

The degree to which political elites differ about foreign policy is “unprecedented since the 1949 revolution” that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power, he said.

Shi, who is widely known as an expert in Sino-US relations, spoke at a forum here on China sponsored by Japan’s Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

He said China’s leadership is divided into two groups, each with a distinct view of the United States. The first group, which represents a majority, doubts that long-term accommodation with the United States is possible because it believes the United States “won’t tolerate China as a world power, even in Asia”.

“It is highly suspicious of US military strategy in East Asia and its alliance relationships, particularly with Japan,” said Shi.

A second group, which is small but highly influential, hopes to reach an accommodation with Washington by 2010 and believes that, in the long run, US forces in Asia provide stability and are important in dealing with the dangers from countries holding weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism, he said.

This faction is also the leading voice for integrating China with multilateral organizations, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) which China formally joined last year.

The contrasting voices of the Chinese political leadership were on open display this week.

On Monday, Li Peng, China’s second most powerful leader, condemned what he called foreign interference in China around human rights, a reference to the constant complaints from Washington about Beijing’s human rights record.

Beijing, he said, is “firmly opposed to interfering in other countries’ internal affairs by using the human rights issue”. Li heads China’s National People’s Congress, or Parliament.

A few days later, Zeng Peiyan, director of China’s State Development Planning Commission, told the official news agency Xinhua that “non-economic factors”, a euphemism for human rights “won’t interfere with the deep economic ties between China and the United States”.

“As long as the two sides can get rid of the impact of non- economic factors,” he said, “Sino-US economic cooperation will grow healthily and have bright prospects.” At present, the more moderate group appears to be ascendant.

For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, US and Chinese intelligence agencies have been sharing information about Osama and his Al Qaeda network and radical Islamic groups in Asia.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.