What China Really Thinks of the U.S.

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There was certainly little sign of good humor in the negotiations over protocol that preceded the Washington summit. Months before Hu was due to arrive in the U.S., Beijing's preoccupation with securing a photo-op at the White House had already injected a sour note to the trip. A senior U.S. official says Hu and his entourage were initially offered a visit to Bush's ranch in Texas or an overnight stay at Camp David in the hope that they might establish a rapport in a more casual setting. But Beijing's insistence on a formal reception at the White House led to those offers being dropped. The squabbling broke out in public in March when White House spokesman Scott McClellan contradicted Chinese officials and asserted that the U.S. was not designating the trip as a full-fledged "state" visit. And there would be no state dinner, either. Only lunch.

As a result of this bickering, says Pei, Bush and Hu will now have only an hour and a half to cover all the issues troubling relations between the two countries — from trade conflicts to Taiwan, from human-rights abuses to the rampant piracy of U.S. goods. "With half the time taken up by translators," adds Pei, "how much of substance can they cram in? These guys are going to be breathless from racing through their talking points."

Such spats would be comical if they did not hint at a worrying lack of understanding on both sides. This defining feature of the relationship was clearly in evidence in late March when U.S. Senators Charles Schumer, Lindsey Graham and Tom Coburn visited Beijing. Schumer and Graham are co-sponsoring a bill — now delayed until the fall — that threatens to slap a 27.5% tariff on Chinese imports to the U.S. unless Beijing allows the Chinese currency to rise sharply, a move the senators believe would help cut America's trade deficit. Chinese businessman Liu Weiping attended a talk given by the senators to a group of students that included members of his executive M.B.A. class at Tsinghua University. Liu, a tech entrepreneur who has visited the U.S. several times and admires much about it, was appalled. Coburn, he claims, talked of himself as "a representative of Jesus. He spoke like he was preaching to us. They said, 'What are your criticisms of your own government?' I don't think they were deliberately trying to insult us, but their superiority complex really put us off."

Public opinion polls conducted in recent years by the Horizon Group, an independent research outfit in Beijing, show that an almost schizophrenic attitude toward the U.S. extends far beyond the upper echelons of Chinese society. A survey in late 2005 showed that two-thirds of the respondents thought Sino-American relations had improved over the last year and that three-quarters of them liked American culture — but the U.S. was also rated as the world's most unfriendly country toward China. Some 56% said they didn't believe that Americans respect China.

Probably the most alarming display of how such mixed emotions can explode into rage came in 1999 when U.S. Air Force planes that were engaged in an operation in the Balkans destroyed part of China's embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese reporters. Despite repeated apologies from Washington for what it dubbed a tragic mistake, the reaction was immediate and violent. Hundreds of thousands of protestors poured into the streets in China's largest cities, burning American flags, throwing stones and torching U.S.-made cars.

Even among widely traveled Chinese, it's still hard to find someone who believes that the bombing was anything but deliberate. Take Hu Xijin, a former foreign correspondent who is now editor of the Global Times, a feisty offshoot of the People's Daily. Hu boasts that the rising circulation of his international affairs-oriented paper demonstrates changing Chinese attitudes to the outside world, especially America: "Chinese people are much more realistic about the United States, and that means their reactions are less extreme." But ask Hu about the Belgrade incident and his genial demeanor vanishes. Hu says he doesn't believe Washington's explanation that the attack was a mistake. His face flushed and his voice rising, he warns that such an incident "must never be allowed to happen again. Never. If it did, the reaction of the Chinese people would be much stronger than before."