Quotes of the Day

If there's any Chinese who feels a warm glow inside when he sees an American flag fluttering in the breeze it's Zhan Bingkui. As foreign-trade manager of the Shanghai Flag and Tent Factory, the chain-smoking 50-year-old sells tens of thousands of flags to America each year. With his livelihood at stake, Zhan is keenly aware of the state of relations between the two countries. In the past few years, he says, Chinese attitudes toward America have improved significantly: "China is more open now and is more friendly to the U.S." Still, the relationship remains complicated, he adds, noting that many Chinese resent America's "bullying" of other countries: "What happened to the U.S. on 9/11 is terrible, but we feel like it was a lesson America had to learn about how they need to respect others."

Zhan's views are a sharp reminder of the complexity with which many Chinese view the U.S. The modern history of China is a still-unfolding tale of a proud, millennia-old civilization coming to terms with a new, shocking world in which other nations are more powerful and technologically advanced. As the dominant player in that story for more than half a century, the U.S. occupies a unique place in the Chinese imagination. To immigrants and students, it is the "Gold Mountain"—a land that, ever since the gold rush in 19th century California, has epitomized the promise of wealth, progress and modernity. The flip side is the global "bully" with which China first clashed in the Korean War, and that to many Chinese still seems intent on preventing their country from rising to its natural place among the world's great powers.

"Chinese perceptions of the United States are deeply ambivalent," says Minxin Pei, China program director at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They mix resentment and admiration, fear with respect, jealousy with the desire to emulate." So long as that volatile mixture constitutes a central, "brittle part of the national psyche," says Pei, there's always the possibility that these emotions will boil over.

With China's President Hu Jintao scheduled to make his first official visit to Washington as head of state on April 20, his nation's love-hate relationship with the U.S. is once again under the spotlight. Much is at stake. After all, the evolution—or lack of it—in the way China's leaders and the country's ordinary people view America will go a long way to determining the course of what is likely to be the 21st century's most important bilateral relationship.

For the moment, at least, Sino-American relations are relatively warm. With Hu and U.S. President George W. Bush having already met on five occasions in just three years—including a tête-à-tête in Beijing last November—few people expect any groundbreaking initiatives this time around. "Hu wants to show a smiling face to the public in the U.S. and say, 'We like you very much and we will stick to peaceful development,'" says Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Beijing's Renmin University. Jin thinks Hu will not only try to allay U.S. unease over China's rising diplomatic and military clout, but will seek to calm concerns over America's ballooning trade deficit with China—which topped $200 billion in 2005. Ideally, Hu would also like to hear a reaffirmation from Bush that Washington rejects any moves by Taiwan's maverick President Chen Shui-bian toward a declaration of independence from the mainland. But whatever Bush says about Taiwan, which the U.S. has pledged to help defend, Hu's most important achievement in Washington may simply be turning up. "From a domestic Chinese point of view," says the Carnegie's Pei, "you have not really established your credentials as a leader until you have been received on the south lawn of the White House with all due pomp and ceremony," such as an honor guard and a 21-gun salute.

That's particularly the case for Hu, says Pei, because he has had the least exposure to the outside world of any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. Hu's predecessor Jiang Zemin spent his early years in Shanghai, China's most cosmopolitan city, studied in the Soviet Union and reveled in his trips overseas; he was proud of his ability to recite from memory chunks of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. By contrast, Hu studied only in China and spent much of his career in its remote, impoverished western provinces. Jiang "liked to make jokes" with his foreign hosts, says Chu Shulong, a professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University. "Hu doesn't make jokes. He's pretty practical."

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."

As ever with things Chinese, the weight of history hangs heavily over the Sino-American relationship. When officials of the Qing Empire began visiting America in the 1860s, some kept diaries that expressed what now seem like eerily familiar opinions. In their book Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, historians R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee write that during the first period of interaction, from 1841 to around 1900, China's view of the U.S. was a mixture of wonder and fear. Woken from torpid indifference to the outside world by humiliating defeats in the Opium Wars, the Qing mandarins decided China must strengthen itself by observing the ways of other countries. But for all their awe at America's technological prowess, of "fire-wheeled vehicles" that moved faster than a Daoist sage "riding the wind," signs of distrust soon emerged. Liang Qichao, a Chinese reformer who visited the U.S. in 1903, expressed concern about American imperialist tendencies. After reading President Teddy Roosevelt's comments on the need for a greater U.S. role in the Pacific, Liang wrote: "I could not stop feeling afraid."

For the next century, China's relations with the U.S. would swing between near adulation and vilification. Amid the turmoil of China's imperial collapse, warlordism, Japanese invasion and civil war, thousands of Chinese went to study at American universities. For a time, most of the country's élite officials, scholars and scientists were U.S.-trained. But that came to an abrupt halt with the Communists' victory in 1949. A year later, Sino-American relations hit their nadir during what Chinese call the "War to Resist America and Aid Korea," which left hundreds of thousands of Chinese dead, along with more than 50,000 Americans. Later, during the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the U.S. was routinely reviled as China's greatest enemy.

Then, in a stunning historical turnaround, U.S. President Richard Nixon visited China, spurring what Arkush and Lee describe as a new period of "rediscovery and respect." By the beginning of China's reform period in 1978, America was once again viewed in a largely positive light by the average Chinese. "The U.S. represented the good life," says Joseph Cheng, head of the Contemporary China Research Project at City University of Hong Kong. "It also represented, in the eyes of university students, the peak of scientific and technological progress."

Today, Chinese still tend to admire American wealth and technological prowess. But one crucial aspect of the relationship has changed: as China's economy has boomed and the nation's importance on the world stage has dramatically expanded, Chinese self-confidence has blossomed. The U.S. may still be the world's undisputed superpower, but the gap is narrowing. Why look upon America with awe or fear when an endless trail of foreign leaders and corporate titans now flocks to China to grab a piece of the action and to pay their respects? Likewise, Chinese see the flood of less exalted foreigners arriving on the mainland in search of employment, business opportunities or the chance to learn Mandarin. They see, too, the way China's leaders are fêted with increasing pomp and ceremony on trips as far afield as Germany, Africa, Australia and the U.S. Indeed, even Washington now looks to China to play a more pivotal role in global diplomacy, not least seeking Beijing's help in contending with the twin threats of nuclear-weapons programs in North Korea and Iran.

Beijing, of course, is hardly averse to making pointed displays of China's burgeoning wealth and power. Last week, in advance of Hu's visit, a 200-strong Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier Wu Yi toured the U.S., signing no less than $16 billion in contracts with American behemoths like Microsoft and Boeing. But the extent of the change in China's sense of itself is equally evident among ordinary folk. A few blocks from Shanghai's Bund, a huge American flag dominates the entrance to an outlet selling the 100%-polyester products of the Shanghai Flag and Tent Factory. In the dim interior, soft-spoken salesman Zhang Xinwei says he admires the U.S.'s economic might and its innovative corporations, remarking: "I don't understand why Americans are scared of China's rise—there are so many great things that still come from America." And yet, says Zhang, he isn't pushing his son to aim for a spot at an American university. A decade ago, this may have been the ambition of most Chinese parents, says Zhang, but times have changed: "Nowadays, my son could be just as successful if he studied in China."

Zhang's words suggest that the endlessly mutating relationship between China and the U.S. has entered a new phase—one in which the balance of power has subtly but significantly shifted. The reverberations of that shift will be felt not only during Hu's trip to Washington, but for decades to come.

• Simon Elegant
• Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the U.S. this week spotlights the world's most important bilateral relationship. To predict where it might be headed, you need to understand what China really thinks of America