The visit of China's President Hu Jintao to the United States this week is yet another opportunity for chatter about the "Chinese threat.'' In the lead-up to his arrival, we have heard rising voices from Congress and from the administration on everything from China's currency manipulation and piracy of intellectual property to its military buildup.

Do not be deceived. There is no real appetite in either Washington or Beijing for confrontation over any of these issues, much less a serious exploration of the challenge that China presents to American global leadership.

Neither government can afford an escalation of tensions. Economically, we are too intertwined. Strip away the packaging on the $200 billion trade deficit with China and you will find American companies running global assembly lines that begin in Ohio, pass through Malaysia, and end up in southern China.

Strategically, the United States is painfully dependent on China to try to cope with the greatest security challenge in northeast Asia: North Korea's nuclear program.

Beijing is wedded to its doctrine of "China's peaceful rise.'' First formulated three years ago, it aims to keep things calm with the United States and most of its neighbors, buying time to manage the tightrope act of continuing high growth while preserving domestic stability.

In any case, Washington is too bogged down in the Middle East to do more than bark now and then about China.

"At the strategic level, the United States is really focused like a laser on the Middle East,'' and the Chinese like it that way, said Asian security expert Kurt Campbell. "They appreciate the fact that with the U.S. attention focused elsewhere, it allows China to play a larger role in Asia as a whole,'' he told a gathering last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Typically, while Washington is focused on Hu's visit, the Chinese defense minister is in the midst of an unprecedented Asian tour that will take him to North and South Korea and to Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. China's prime minister has just finished a swing through Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Cambodia.

In my own travels through Asia recently, from South Korea and Japan in the northeast down to Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong in Southeast Asia, I found a stunning growth in China's influence. The question of how to deal with China's rise is high on every agenda.

Everywhere people are looking over their shoulder, worried about China's burgeoning strength and presence. They are equally fearful that the United States is abandoning the field to China. But they also don't want to choose between these two powers.

That is even true in Japan, where the popular media and politicians are full of talk about the Chinese threat. But look a little closer and you will also find a growing counter-movement, particularly in elite policy circles, warning against becoming separated from the rest of Asia. The battle for succession to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who is stepping down in the fall, is now being shaped around this issue.

The China-Japan rivalry tends to reveal the more muscular side of China's "peaceful rise,'' one that Americans rarely glimpse. In Vietnam, senior foreign policy officials recounted what happened when the Japanese came courting to gain Vietnam's backing for a resolution to give them permanent membership in the U.N. Security Council, a key goal of Japan's foreign policy. Japan is Vietnam's largest aid donor and a major source of foreign investment.

China and Vietnam have a long and stormy history as neighbors, including wars that go back centuries and -- more recently -- a brief invasion in 1979 that ended in defeat for the Chinese. Relations these days are relatively good, however, fed by growing trade, heavily in China's favor.

Hu, in his role as leader of the Chinese Communist Party, sent a special envoy to talk to the leadership of the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party. Sometimes, a Vietnamese official told me, the Chinese can be very indirect. Not this time. The message was simple: "Don't do it!'' The ``or else'' was left unspoken.

The Vietnamese compromised, supporting Japan's membership but refusing to co-sponsor the resolution. China was not pleased, but apparently accepted it.

For the Vietnamese, a senior official explained, they must engage in a "lot of fine balancing.'' Vietnam "can't stop engaging China'' but wants to make sure China becomes a "predictable'' power.

In Washington, when the cloud of rhetoric clears, that formula pretty much sums up the reality of U.S.-China relations, too.

On the surface, President Bush's week-long swing through Northeast Asia has been a strong contrast with his recent stormy (and, some say, stumbling) excursion into Latin America.

There was little sign of overt anti-Americanism. And no Asian leader will openly oppose American leadership in the flamboyant manner of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Even prickly China swallowed President Bush's barbs about lack of democratic freedom in China, quietly acknowledging the two powers' differences. In contrast to the meeting of leaders from the Americas, the annual summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Korea will embrace the principles of free trade.

Beneath the polite appearance, however, there is no less a challenge to American leadership in Asia. While Washington fiddled, a powerful momentum has been building up in Asia toward the formation of an East Asian Free Trade Area or, more ambitiously, an East Asian Community, modeled on the European community. Led by China, the East Asian grouping pointedly excludes the United States.

The APEC agenda focuses on an initiative to counter the spread of avian flu and to offer a common push at the WTO meeting in Hong Kong next month to revive the Doha Round of global trade talks. The Bush administration has its own agenda for the APEC meeting: to reposition itself as a leader of economic growth and integration in the region. For this, APEC has the virtue of being a more open organization than those behind the disappointment at the American summit. Its 21 members span the Pacific Rim, bringing together nations from Chile and Mexico to Russia, China and Southeast Asia. But this attention to APEC may be a case of too little, too late. The momentum to give the amorphous APEC an ongoing institutional role, beyond its annual summit meetings, has slowed in recent years. Its pledges for mutual tariff reduction exist almost entirely on paper.

Until this year, the Bush administration barely addressed regional economic issues at APEC. It preferred to use the meetings to promote a post-9/11 security agenda of anti-terrorism. U.S. trade policy has focused more on reaching free trade agreements with a few selected "friends" in that war, such as Singapore and Australia.

Meanwhile a Chinese-sponsored move to hold an East Asian summit offers the most visible expression of a trend of declining American influence in Asia. That meeting will take place in Malaysia in mid-December. The gathering groups the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Japan, China, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand. Pointedly not invited is the United States.

This meeting is an outgrowth of the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) process - an annual dialogue of ASEAN with China, South Korea and Japan that began in December 1997 in the midst of the Asian financial crisis. The APT has grown into an elaborate mechanism for cooperation in a range of areas from finance and agriculture to information technology. This reflects an underlying economic reality - the growth of regional and bilateral trade agreements and the rapid rise of intra-Asian trade.

Until fairly recently, foreign trade in East Asia was dominated by trans-Pacific trade with the United States. But the share of Asian exports headed to the U.S. has dropped dramatically, while those destined for other Asian nations has risen. In the two decades from 1981 to 2001, according to economist Edward Lincoln, the share of intra-regional exports has risen from 32 percent to 40 percent, and intra-regional imports from 32 percent to 50 percent.

Much of the growth of regional integration is being driven by China, which is generating enormous demand for imports of raw materials as well as for semi-finished goods that are assembled for export. China has not been hesitant to use this role to expand its influence in the region. It has embraced the APT as a road towards creation of an East Asian community. At the ASEAN summit last year, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao declared that such a community was a "long-term strategic choice in the interests of China's development." China has also outmatched the U.S. in negotiating free trade agreements, both bilateral and regional. The most impressive is an FTA deal between China and ASEAN set to take effect in 2010. Beijing even dreams of an Asian currency, based on the Chinese yuan, to rival the dollar and the euro.

China is not the first nation to try for such East Asian economic unity. Back in the days when Japan was riding high as an economic superpower, it too talked of leading an East Asian bloc, based on a yen currency zone. As late as 1997, in response to the Asian financial crisis, Japan proposed the creation of an Asian Monetary Fund, a kind of alternate regional financial system. More recently, both South Korea and Japan offered their own visions of an East Asian community in 2001. And both countries tried to match China in the APT by offering to form free trade agreements with ASEAN.

Japan, however, was never as successful as China is likely to be. "It would seem that Japan is a natural counterweight to China, but Tokyo is generally perceived as reactive and incapable of outflanking Beijing," Brad Glosserman, director of research at the Pacific Forum of CSIS, wrote recently. "Its economic dynamism is no match for that of China."

The United States has never been friendly toward efforts to create an East Asian economic bloc, viewing them as chipping away at the global trading system and rivaling American leadership. But Asia is arguably only following in American footsteps -- witness the NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico and the more recent trade pact with Central America.

Many American policymakers believe these developments are partly a product of the failure of the Bush administration to articulate - much less pursue - a strategy to engage East Asia.

"The United States has greater strategic interests in Asia now than it did in Europe before World War I or World War II,'' argued a recent report of the Grand Strategic Choices Working Group, co-chaired by John Hopkin's University's Francis Fukuyama and Princeton's G. John Ikenberry. "Thus," the report continued, "it is unfortunate that part of the problem, in East Asia in particular, is that America's relative lack of interest in tending to the region has caused some allies of the U.S. to doubt our resolve and question the value of resisting unfavorable developments alone."

The report echoes other policymakers in suggesting the U.S. form its own East Asian economic zone with Japan, South Korea and Australia."That's a non-starter,'' says Professor Vinod Aggarwal, director of Berkeley's APEC study center. "Nobody wants to be cut out of the China market."

Privately, Bush administration officials downplay the importance of the East Asian summit in December, pointing to the lack of any concrete agenda. The addition of India, Australia and New Zealand to the invitation list, along with Japan, should effectively counter any Chinese initiative, they believe.

But those countries also fear being left out of whatever may emerge from this process. They cannot afford to be left on the outside, looking in.

Ultimately, neither can the United States. The President's trip is a belated recognition of that fact. But to be more than a momentary gesture, the United States must give East Asia the consistent attention it deserves.

In a May 14 lecture hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Francis Fukuyama, PhD -- professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University and renowned author of The End of History and the Last Man -- discussed the problem of weak, underdeveloped nation-states; the effectiveness of various approaches to strengthening such states; and the importance of culture, context and history in the task of state-building. His lecture, titled "State-building: A Framework for Thinking about the Transfer of Institutions to Developing Countries," drew a full room of attendees to the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall

A former member of the RAND Corp. and the U.S. Department of State who has written widely on issues of democratization and international political economy, Fukuyama first presented a framework with which nation-states can be evaluated according to two key criteria: the strength of the state, and the scope of its functions. The first refers to a state's ability to enforce its own laws and policies; the second refers to how involved the state becomes in carrying out various societal functions, ranging from basic functions such as maintaining law and order and protecting public health, to more "activist" functions such as running industries and redistributing wealth.

Fukuyama asserted that from a development standpoint, nation-states should be strong but should carry out only the minimum necessary functions. He said that only one country he has studied -- New Zealand -- has effectively moved toward this ideal in recent years. He noted that many struggling, developing nations, such as Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan and Turkey, are overly ambitious in their scope -- attempting to run vast industries, for example -- but are weak and unable to carry out their policies because of factors like corruption. Other states that Fukuyama identified as "failed states," such as Haiti and Sierra Leone, are both limited in scope and weak, attempting to carry out only the most basic governmental functions and not doing it very well.

Fukuyama then discussed and evaluated various approaches to strengthening developing nations. He noted that in recent years much emphasis has been placed on encouraging such nations to reduce the scope of their functions, through deregulation and privatization, but said the effectiveness of this approach is now in question. A more effective approach, he said, is helping weak nation-states build their own strong institutions, such as political parties, public health networks and central banking.

Unfortunately, Fukuyama said, sometimes the efforts of outside organizations to strengthen a country's institutions only make things worse, because solutions are imposed from outside rather than developed from within. "Ideally, we would want a country's own public health system to handle that country's problems with AIDS or malaria," he said. "But when you flood the country with your organization's own doctors and nurses and infrastructure, what do the local doctors do? They quit their government posts to get on the payroll of your NGO." In a few months or years, when the organization withdraws its support, Fukuyama noted, the system collapses, because it was not built to be self-sustaining.

At the end of his talk, Fukuyama emphasized the importance of understanding local culture, context and history in the task of state building. For example, he said, those who run programs aiming to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa should consider working with traditional faith healers, as they are an important part of the healthcare system in Africa.