One confounding reality Washington faces in dealing with Beijing is that there are two Chinas -- not including Taiwan.
The China of easily wounded nationalism was on display in the standoff over the US surveillance plane, especially early on. The China of economic interests with the US also emerged, perhaps decisively in the end.
Is China a competitor or a partner? US President George W. Bush says it is both.
China stands on two pillars, precariously, says Douglas Paal, president of the Asia Pacific Policy Center. The nationalistic one demanded China have a tough initial response "lest they be called wimps or traitors."
The pragmatic one, driven by the realization that much of China's growth has been due to business with the US, demanded that the dispute not drag on too long. Hence the "bluster, the swagger," Paal said at a Brookings Institution conference last week, but then, in his view, "the quick retreat at the end."
There is, on one side, the China of the People's Liberation Army and the Communist Party propaganda department, which experts say combined to whip up anti-US sentiment during the impasse.
Then there is the China reflected by much of its civilian leadership, which was quick to send delegations to Washington when Bush took office to make sure Beijing got off to a good start with him.
All this duality begins to sound like another kind of ping-pong diplomacy -- with competing Chinese players at both ends of the table batting the ball back and forth.
"Although it took them too long to get there, the internationalist viewpoint prevailed in China," Sandy Berger, who was former president Bill Clinton's national security adviser, said in an interview. "Those who believe that the US-China relationship was important obviously were able to have the upper hand over those who perhaps wanted to make more mischief out of this."
Minxin Pei, a specialist on Chinese society with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the China-US relationship is like a huge tree: stout, tangled roots, branches everywhere.
The spy-plane dispute was "like another whack of the big ax," he said, not bringing it down, but weakening it.
"It's a relationship that requires day-to-day care and cultivation," said Bates Gill, director of the Brookings' Center for Northwest Asian Policy Studies.
Michael Armacost, former US ambassador to Japan and the Philippines and now Brookings' president, noted every recent president has had an early China problem.
President Ronald Reagan got caught up in vexing questions over arms sales to Taiwan, just where Bush is now. Former president Bush had the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on his plate. Clinton was dogged for two years by debate over linking trade and human rights.
Those men generally were able to stabilize the relationship after a time, Armacost said.
After North Korea shot down an electronic surveillance plane over the Sea of Japan in April 1969, the president, Richard Nixon, temporarily halted spy flights in the region. In February 1972, Nixon made an historic trip to China, becoming the first US president to visit the communist country.
US experts on China say the Chinese military was obstructionist in this latest surveillance-plane dispute, passing on misinformation to the government either through design or incompetence. "Elements of the PLA regard us as public enemy No. 1," Armacost said.
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