Guest editorial: China's premier comes calling

The Bush administration has proved adept at dealing with China beginning with the new president's first major policy crisis -- a U.S. spy plane forced to land on the Chinese island of Hainan after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet -- shortly after Bush took office.

The Taiwan legislature lowered the temperature on one topic sure to come up during the visit: China's blustering threats to invade Taiwan if it looks like the island Beijing considers a renegade province might declare independence.

The Taiwanese legislature scaled back a referendum bill that Beijing construed as allowing for a popular vote on independence.

The long-term solution to Taiwan, the president must stress, is mutual trade, travel and investment and not a militaristic belligerence that raises the question of whether China's new leaders, supposedly less ideological, more pragmatic, more open-minded, are all that different from their predecessors.

The Bush administration has successfully enlisted China in multilateral talks aimed at reining in North Korean's nuclear ambitions. Bush must stress that China is the only nation with the clout to make North Korea listen but that it's in China's own long-term interests to ease the regime of Kim Jong Il into history.

However, what Wen's visit is really about is trade. China is hardly about to jeopardize its booming economy and its best customer -- U.S. trade deficit with China is on course to reach $120 billion this year -- with a trade war. But there are difficult issues between the two nations.

China has been slow to implement the market-opening commitments it made to join the World Trade Organization and it tolerates an unacceptable level of intellectual and product piracy.

On the other hand, for domestic political reasons, Bush has imposed tariffs on Chinese steel and quotas on Chinese textiles and recently announced plans to impose punitive duties on Chinese-made television sets. China has threatened trade reprisals although so far that has amounted to postponement of a planned purchase of U.S. soybeans.

It is a measure of how far U.S.-China relations have come that one of the most pressing issues between a Chinese premier and an American president is the price of color TVs.