Bush in Asia: friendly turf

As President Bush arrives in Japan Tuesday, he can be grateful for one thing: He won't have a Hugo Chávez to contend with on a week-long trip to Asia.

Less than two weeks after a Latin American trip that got bogged down in the Venezuelan president's high-profile challenge to the American recipe for prosperity, Mr. Bush heads to friendlier territory.

With a focus on economics and security, the president faces little opposition from a dynamic Asia that has cooperated in the war on terror. Nor does he need to fear a rebuff, like the one dealt him at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina, when he attends an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting on Friday in South Korea.

"We could see some ugly scenes in Seoul, because anti-Americanism is running high there and the current government has a populist vein and is not above playing to the crowds," says Dan Blumenthal, a resident fellow in East Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "But there's no Hugo Chávez there."

Bush travels to four countries - Japan, South Korea, China, and Mongolia - with his biggest challenge coming from China.

Trade issues and China's currency will top the agenda in Beijing. The US and China last week signed a three-year agreement to reduce the billions of dollars of China's clothing shipments to the United States.

Still, Bush is under pressure from a restive Congress to clamp down even more on Chinese imports and to threaten trade sanctions if China does not revalue the yuan. Congress wants such action in order to open up the huge market of 1.3 billion Chinese to American products.

At the same time, Bush is under pressure from an alliance of conservatives and neoconservative foreign-policy idealists to do more to advance in China the international agenda of freedom and democracy he laid out in his inaugural address in January.

"The atmosphere in Beijing towards the US is quite positive right now, from their perspective everything is going hunky-dory," says David Shambaugh, director of the China policy program at George Washington University in Washington.

Just back from a trip to China, Mr. Shambaugh says the Chinese are satisfied with the direction even of traditionally prickly issues like Taiwan - but are bewildered by the "barrage of attacks and criticisms from different quarters in Washington" including the Republican right, neoconservative forces, human rights and democracy groups, and trade organizations.

US officials say Bush will bring up the full range of issues that figure in the US-China relationship, but that the president will stick to a more "realist" diplomatic tack that foresees gradual political change in China.

That won't please China's toughest critics here, but it is in line with what Chinese officials anticipate, Shambaugh says.

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