HAVING established itself as the economic powerhouse of Asia, China is this week consolidating its new, more open relationship with other world powers, including the United States and Russia, and this could have positive implications for world stability for years to come.
The US Secretary of State, Mr Warren Christopher, meets the Chinese President, Mr Jiang Zemin, in Beijing today in the first top-level US-China meeting since a row over Taiwan 18 months ago.
Also yesterday it was announced that Mr Jiang will travel to Moscow early next year to meet President Yeltsin and the two sides are expected to sign agreements on arms reductions along the 4,300 km Sino-Russian border in the near future.
The decisions were reached at a meeting between the Chinese Foreign Minister, Mr Qian Qichen, and his Russian counterpart, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, who arrived from Japan, where he engineered the biggest improvement in Moscow-Tokyo relations since the end of the Cold War.
The diplomatic traffic in and out of Beijing has intensified in the last three months with a series of high-level conferences and visits, as China seeks to establish its status as an economic giant.
"China is trying to turn itself into one of the big international capitals of the world," said a diplomat from the former Soviet Union.
As always the most problematic relationship for China outside of Asia is that with the US, and Beijing hopes Mr Christopher's visit could lead to the first Beijing/Washington summit for many years.
President Clinton will meet Mr Jiang at the Asian Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit next Monday in the Philippines. Mr Clinton will also hold bilateral talks with the Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Ryutaro Hashimoto, and President Kim Young-sam of South Korea.
Mr Christopher will prepare for a broad agenda for the Clinton/Jiang meeting that will include regional security issues, such as the Korean peninsula, preventing an arms race in Southeast Asia, (nuclear) non-proliferation and trade and human rights, according to the deputy US National Security Adviser, Mr Samuel Berger.
The US Vice-President, Mr Al Gore, is expected to visit the Chinese capital early next year prior to a fully-fledged summit aimed at normalising relations between the US and China. The human rights issue is not expected to spoil the meeting between Mr Christopher and Chinese leaders. As always before such a visit, outstanding dissident cases have been dealt with by the courts in recent weeks.
Human rights was, however, the cause of a flare-up between Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein of California and Chinese leaders If when a group of US senators visited China two weeks ago for an unpublicised visit, according to a western diplomat. Beijing remains suspicious that the US is trying to contain rather than engage China and has stepped up its demands recently in the official media for a change in US policy
"The United States is bending over backwards to engage China," said US China expert, Mr David Shambaugh of George Washing ton University, when in Beijing last week.
The US is "self-righteous and alienating" in its foreign policy and "only when the United States drops the idea of [containing China], removes its ideological bias against China and stops basing its foreign policies purely on its own economic interests can we expect significant progress in bilateral ties", said the Chinese Business Weekly.
Beijing accuses the US of employing a strategy of containment based on a security defence chain linking South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Thailand. Mr Christopher's trip is part of an effort to repair relations after a series of disputes over issues such as Taiwan, human rights, trade and arms proliferation.
Earlier this year when China held war games off Taiwan to discourage pro-independence voting in Taiwan's elections, the US sent two aircraft carriers to the region and Washington-Beijing relations reached a low point.
Beijing links Washington's policies to an alleged revival of Japanese militarism. Japan remains the one country in Asia where international tensions with China remain at a high level, particularly over disputed East China Sea islands, known in Chinese as the Diaoyus and in Japanese as the Senkakus.
Some 15 Chinese activists yesterday protested in Beijing against US support for Japan's bid to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Japan was not qualified to become a permanent member because many Japanese politicians had been reluctant to apologise for its war atrocities and had tried to whitewash history, the group said in a letter to Mr Christopher, who arrived in Beijing-late yesterday for a three-day visit.
The leader of the group is Mr Tong Zeng, who was recently forced to leave Beijing during a period of heightened tension over the islands when he threatened to stage an unauthorised demonstration at the Japanese embassy.
Mr Jiang will travel to Moscow at Mr Yeltsin's invitation next spring. The two leaders met during the Russian president's tour of China in April in a visit that both sides hailed as instrumental in forging a new, strategic partnership. "This is a sign that our relations are becoming very businesslike," said a Russian official.
The Russian foreign minister secured a promise from Japan to release $500 million in long-delayed aid to Russia and Tokyo may consider Moscow's longstanding offer of the joint development of the disputed Kuril islands - currently part of Russia.