Chinese Leader Coming to U.S. Well Prepared

Planning Reflects Priority on Relations

BEIJING -- The Chinese government has devoted intense energy into getting President Hu Jintao ready for this week's visit to the United States, feeding intelligence, position papers and economic statistics to a leader famous for meticulous preparation.

The careful planning -- "I've never seen such heavy preparation," a Chinese analyst said -- reflects an assessment by the Communist Party that a smooth relationship with the United States must be the top priority of China's foreign policy. As a result, according to Chinese officials and analysts, President Bush on Thursday will be meeting with a man determined not to let friction over trade, intellectual property, human rights and Taiwan dilute his message of cooperation between Beijing and Washington.

"We believe the China-U.S. relationship is one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world," said a senior Foreign Ministry official involved in the preparations.

The strategic decision by Hu and his party to pursue good relations with the United States did not arise out of sentiment or shared values. Rather, according to Chinese analysts, it grew from a calculation that China, rising from poverty but still facing monumental challenges at home, cannot afford adversarial relations with the world's only superpower and an indispensable source of foreign investment and technology.

In addition, they said, Hu needs a friendly visit to the United States to bolster his leadership in the party. The sight of Hu being welcomed with pomp and exchanging views with Bush, diplomats said, also will play well to the Chinese public, eager to see the country earn respect in major capitals.

For this reason, they said, Chinese officials argued that Hu's two days in Washington -- which will follow a two-day visit to Seattle that begins Tuesday -- should be qualified as a full-blown state visit. Although that idea was nixed by the White House, the visiting Chinese leader is scheduled to get a 21-gun salute on the White House lawn to televise to his country's 1.3 billion inhabitants.

Despite his desire to play well in Washington, Hu, 63, is unlikely to engage in the same crowd-pleasing showmanship as did his predecessors: Deng Xiaoping put on a 10-gallon hat during his visit to the United States in 1979 and Jiang Zemin burst into song and recited the Gettysburg Address during his trip in 1997. Bush went on a bicycle ride while in China last November.

In Hu's rise through party ranks, he has earned a reputation as a cautious bureaucrat with a formidable memory and great powers of concentration, not as a back-slapping politician or a leader prone to bold strokes. During his first visit to the United States, in 2002 as vice president, Hu amazed the governor of New Jersey and his aides not with antics but by reciting from memory the names and performances of U.S. firms invested in Zhejiang province, which has a sister relationship with New Jersey.

At home, Hu's personal life has been closely protected -- censors forbid publishing anything about him except what the official New China News Agency hands down -- and little is known about how he spends his time. When he was a senior official at the Communist Youth League earlier in his career, his office bookshelves were nearly bare and he seemed always to be writing instructions to lower-ranking cadres, former colleagues said.

Hu has disappointed the many Chinese who expected his ascension to power to result in a liberalized political atmosphere. Instead, controls have tightened over the press and Internet and the U.S.-Chinese human rights dialogue has stiffened over a number of unresolved cases, some of which are likely to arise in Hu's discussions in Washington.

For instance, prosecutors here declared March 17 that they had insufficient evidence to try Zhao Yan, a researcher for the New York Times's Beijing bureau who was jailed 19 months ago on charges of revealing state secrets to foreigners. But Zhao has remained in jail, despite pleas from the Bush administration for his release, while China's party-controlled justice system sorts out what to do.

Similarly, Yang Jianli, a democracy campaigner with a U.S. green card, has remained in prison following his arrest in April 2002 on charges of espionage after illegally entering China. Appeals for his release from colleagues in academia in the United States and from U.S. and U.N. officials have failed. Bush has raised the issue with Hu before, but a bipartisan group of 119 members of Congress appealed to the White House last week to do so again when Hu arrives in Washington.