United States Foreign Relations China

For much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with $1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of $180,000 for the Dalai Lama, according to newly released U.S. intelligence documents. The money for the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama was part of the CIA's worldwide effort during the height of the Cold War to undermine Communist governments, particularly in the Soviet Union and China. In fact, the U.S.

The man expected to take over as leader of the world's most populous nation left today on a diplomatic tour that will bring him to Washington and a probable meeting with President Bush. Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao is scheduled to stop in Singapore and Malaysia before traveling to the U.S. on Saturday for a weeklong visit that will allow American officials to take further measure of the man nearly everyone believes will succeed President Jiang Zemin within a year. Hu's visit comes as Sino-U.

The breathtaking change seemed to come from nowhere. Three months ago, Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui ushered in an era of heightened confrontation in East Asia by redefining Taiwan's relationship to China as that of one state to another. His statement--which he refused to retract and was scheduled to repeat in a National Day address early today--raised the possibility of military action by China, which claims Taiwan as part of its own territory.

Responding to U.S. criticism of its human rights record, China returned fire in a blistering rebuttal Monday--a point-by-point dismantling of American society that depicts a nation beset by crime, violent media images, indifference to poverty and arrogant foreign policy. Most of the report, the latest in a series issued annually in recent years by the State Council Information Office, is based on a single cornerstone: that the U.S.

The News: President Bush has recommended extension of China's most-favored-nation (MFN) low-tariff trade status with the United States. But Congress could impose a cutoff or insist on conditional renewal. Bush's announcement last week came just days before today's second anniversary of the Chinese government's violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing, and it is certain to face opposition.

Relaxing in the kitchen of his small apartment, Fei Ye recalled the screams of fellow Chinese prisoners. "We all saw and heard the torture," said Fei, 28, a writer and translator of Russian poetry who was active in the Democracy Movement in China. Fei was arrested in 1983 for printing a banned literary journal called Lone Army. A Communist Party loyalist had spotted him editing the journal in a classroom in Harbin, a city in Heilongjiang, China's northernmost province.

As Washington and Beijing move toward an exchange of visits in the next two years between President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Americans will hear lots of talk about the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. That event was seared into the American consciousness as the "Tiananmen Square massacre." In a night of terror, the Chinese army shot its way into Beijing against the unarmed resistance of the city's citizens, ending seven weeks of protests.

A U.S. Navy spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided Sunday over the South China Sea, causing the American craft to make an emergency landing in China and the Chinese plane to crash, U.S. and Chinese officials said. The 24 crew members aboard the EP-3 U.S. reconnaissance plane were unhurt, but U.S. defense officials said they have been unable to establish contact with the crew since the craft came to ground on Hainan island, a Chinese province off the country's southern coast.

Like modern-day Marco Polos with cellular phones, Hollywood executives are venturing to China seeking the same kind of profits they reaped exporting fantasy to the rest of the world. But despite China's promise of 1.3 billion potential customers, a burgeoning middle class enamored of entertainment, a flourishing creative community and a growing, less shackled economy, the largest untapped market for American movies and TV shows remains maddeningly out of reach.

A Chinese company that was ordered by President Bush to sell a Seattle aircraft parts company protested the decision Monday, saying it would jeopardize Sino-U.S. relationships in the aviation industry. The state-owned China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corp. (or CATIC) said the divestiture order "will undoubtedly cause negative impact on future cooperation between the aviation industries of the two countries." Citing national security considerations, Bush ordered CATIC on Feb.

To see how much China has changed since Richard Nixon flew here 30 years ago and shook hands with the Communists, look no farther than the hotel where the famous Shanghai Communique was inked. The hotel's simple two-story assembly hall where history was made has been bulldozed. Instead of saving it as a tribute to the rapprochement, the Chinese tore it down five years ago to make way for a state-of-the-art conference facility, complete with underground parking and an indoor swimming pool.

President Bush today called for an end to religious persecution in China, less than 24 hours after Chinese President Jiang Zemin asserted that "religious faiths are protected by our constitution." In a nationally televised address here, Bush also called for free elections "all the way to the national level."

On the first day of his historic visit here in 1972, President Nixon proposed that China and the United States end their enmity and start a "long march" together. "While we cannot close the gulf between us," he said, "we can try to bridge it so that we may be able to talk across it." Exactly 30 years to the day later, President Bush became the sixth U.S.

He's the man who launched a thousand puns, virtually all of them the same, by writers who play on his surname by asking: "Hu's on first?" The man they're referring to is Hu Jintao, China's vice president, and by all accounts, he is indeed on first, waiting in the wings to succeed President Jiang Zemin as the man leading this nation of 1.3 billion people.

President Bush and Chinese President Jiang Zemin agreed today to expand U.S.-China contacts, announcing that both Jiang and Vice President Hu Jintao will soon visit the United States. Bush and Jiang made the announcement--a further sign of the warming of Sino-U.S.-relations--at a dramatic news conference punctuated by two American reporters' insistent but polite questioning of Jiang on the degree of religious freedom in China.

America's complex engagement with China defies flat conclusions and bright lines. The two nations connect and collide on so many different fronts that the relationship is never moving solely in one direction. Almost always, it is getting better and worse, simultaneously. With so much at stake, the U.S. can't afford the luxury of allowing any single issue to dominate its relations with China.

When it comes to misleading the American public, it's hard to top the Clinton administration. To understand this, it's worth exploring in detail the facts and nuances underlying one aspect of the president's visit to China--namely, what he said and did concerning Taiwan. Last week, during his stopover in Shanghai, Clinton made what was the most important presidential pronouncement on American policy toward Taiwan in more than 15 years.

The Nixon administration Feb. 21-28, 1972: President Richard Nixon visits China. The historic trip is the first by a U.S. president and follows extensive preparation by Henry Kissinger and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai. Nixon exchanges compliments and discusses poetry with ailing Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung, and the president and Chou trade toasts with potent Chinese liquor. To mark the occasion, Madame Mao receives the state visitors in traditional Chinese silks.

China enforced a strict silence domestically about the reported bugging of its U.S.-made presidential plane Tuesday but indicated that it won't let the allegations get in the way of an upcoming visit by President Bush. "I don't see this affair having an impact on any other issues," Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said.

As government officials declined to comment Saturday on reports that U.S. intelligence had bugged a new Chinese presidential aircraft, some American experts predicted that the alleged incident will have no lasting impact on Sino-American relations. Officials at the CIA, White House and State Department all cited a policy against responding to reports of espionage activities. "On these types of allegations, our policy is just not to comment," said Mike Tadie, a CIA spokesman.