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.

Does the conflict in Iraq amount to a civil war? In many ways, the public debate over this question is largely political. Calling Iraq a "civil war" implies yet another failure for the Bush administration and adds force to the question of whether U.S. troops still have a constructive role to play.

Politics aside, however, the definition of civil war is not arbitrary. For some -- and perhaps especially Americans -- the term brings to mind all-out historical conflicts along the lines of the U.S. or Spanish civil wars. According to this notion, there will not be civil war in Iraq until we see mass mobilization of sectarian communities behind more or less conventional armies.

But a more standard definition is common today:

1) Civil war refers to a violent conflict between organized groups within a country that are fighting over control of the government, one side's separatist goals, or some divisive government policy.

By this measure, the war in Iraq has been a civil war not simply since the escalation of internecine killings following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, but at least since the United States handed over formal control to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004.

Here's why: Although the insurgents target the U.S. military, they are also fighting the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and killing large numbers of Iraqis. There is little reason to believe that if the United States were suddenly to withdraw its forces, they would not continue their battle to control or shape the government.

Political scientists who study civil war have proposed various refinements to this rough definition to deal with borderline cases. One issue concerns how much killing has to occur -- and at what rate.

2) For a conflict to qualify as a civil war, most academics use the threshold of 1,000 dead, which leads to the inclusion of a good number of low-intensity rural insurgencies.

Current estimates suggest that more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in fighting since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 -- a level and rate of killing that is comparable to numerous other conflicts that are commonly described as civil wars, such as those in Lebanon (1975-1990) and Sri Lanka (beginning in 1983).

The organization -- or rather, disorganization -- of the warring communities in Iraq means that a large-scale conventional conflict along the lines of the U.S. Civil War is unlikely to develop. More probable is a gradual escalation of the current "dirty war" between neighborhood militias that have loose ties to national political factions and are fighting almost as much within sectarian lines as across them.

This is roughly what happened in Lebanon and at a lower level in Turkish cities in the late 1970s. Ethnic cleansing will occur not as a systematic, centrally directed campaign (as in Bosnia), but as a result of people moving to escape danger.

And there's another twist to the terminology:

3) If the conflict in Iraq becomes purely a matter of violence between Sunni and Shiite communities driven by revenge and hatred rather than by political goals, many political scientists would say that it is something other than civil war.

Almost no one, for example, calls the Hindu-Muslim violence in India a civil war.

A civil war has to involve attempts to grab power at the center of government or in a given region, or to use violence to change some major government policy.

In Iraq's case, however, the vacuum of power at the center means that communal violence will inevitably be tied to struggles for political power and control.

A final complication concerns the nature of international involvement. Some argue, for example, that the war in Bosnia should be seen as an interstate war rather than a civil war, since the Bosnian Serb forces were armed and directed largely by Belgrade. Post-Mobutu violence in Congo is often termed a civil war, even though fighters have been closely tied to armies from neighboring states.

4) A conflict may be both a civil and an interstate war at the same time.

The Vietnam War, for instance, clearly comprised both a civil war in the South and an interstate war involving the North, the South and the United States.

Iraq may be moving in this direction. The United States and Britain are already openly involved, and such neighboring countries as Iran and Syria are more covertly involved. Not that it matters to the people dying there, but the next debate here may turn on whether what is already a civil war in Iraq should be viewed as an interstate war as well.