CHONGQING, China -- Her hair was dyed the color of Beaujolais. She wore expensive sneakers from Taiwan, jeans from Hong Kong and a trendy T-shirt emblazoned with an American flag. She eats at Kentucky Fried Chicken, loves Julia Roberts and dreams of visiting New York to see Broadway and the Statue of Liberty.
"Who are the big American fashion designers?" she asked eagerly. "Is the lifestyle of millionaires very decadent?"
Relocate 20-year-old college student Yu Xin Yan from the downtown shopping district of this provincial Chinese city to any small-town American mall and she might fit in well, so powerful are the forces of globalization in the early 21st Century.
But now the differences: Yu is a member of the Communist Youth League. Her father is a Communist Party member. She is an ardent nationalist who believes the party will lead China to superpower status, and she is critical of the American government over the recent incident in which a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided.
"You don't have to worry about China," she said, acknowledging that many Americans worry about the rising economic and military might of China, an authoritarian state with a nuclear arsenal. "Even when we become a superpower, we won't invade. The Chinese people love peace."
Free thinker and loyal nationalist, Yu in one conversation of many with ordinary Chinese across the country encapsulated some of the basic hopes, concerns and conflicting expectations about U.S.-China relations during an unsettling period in which President Bush has portrayed China murkily and somewhat ominously as a "strategic competitor."
Not since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War has the United States been confronted with such a powerful ideological foe as China. But this disquieting comparison, apt perhaps when it reflects military tension over Taiwan or China's poor human rights record, does not tell the whole story. Nor does the spy plane incident.
In the last 20 years, China has embarked on a fundamental transformation from a closed society to a hybrid free-market state with one-party rule.
China's future is tied much more closely to its relationship with the United States than Russia's ever was. It is a significant trade and investment partner, an eager consumer of American culture and a comparatively much freer society than the Soviet Union under communism.
Cheers for 'Erin Brockovich'
America's presence and influence is nearly everywhere in China, from Hollywood movies such as "Erin Brockovich," which are sold in even the smallest cities as pirated $1 videodiscs, to the oil exploration equipment from Dallas-based Halliburton Co. used by engineer Chen Guang Chuan in far-western Xinjiang province.
When Chen, 37, who works in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, was asked to name the first five things that came to mind when he thought of America, he replied: Bill Gates, aircraft carriers, Coca-Cola, Silicon Valley and Nasdaq.
His technology-weighted answer reflects a powerful current of recognition among many Chinese that America's wealth and success is a model for China's aspirations. Chen would like his son to learn English and study in the U.S. one day.
But then there is the second of his American symbols-the aircraft carrier-to suggest that despite the common interests that link the two countries, there also is a strong level of mistrust of America by the Chinese. This mistrust is fueled by deep-seated national pride, competing military ambitions in the Pacific and the Communist Party's ability to shape public opinion through the state-controlled media.
Since President Bush took office, promising to bring a more critical eye to U.S.-China relations, the two sides have sparred repeatedly over Taiwan and human rights and faced off diplomatically over April's surveillance plane incident. This has led to deep uncertainty across America about China.
Americans debate about what kind of relationship to forge with China, and about whether it is more important to engage China economically and coax it into becoming a more open, freer society, or whether the United States should be more wary of China's ambitions, more critical of its failings and tougher politically on Beijing.
While there is conflict, and at times contempt, in diplomatic channels, a different picture of the future of U.S.-China relations emerged from conversations with many Chinese during a 12-day trip across the country, from West to East, from Xinjiang province on the ancient Silk Road to the new commercial capital, Shanghai.
What is apparent is that many Chinese have an extremely positive impression of American people, ideas and symbols, though a more cautious, sometimes hostile, view of the U.S. government, President Bush and the near-term outlook for U.S.-China relations.
Much of the criticism seems rote. When China's newspapers attack the U.S. as a "hegemonic" state that thinks it is the world's policeman, it is easy to find people on the streets who will repeat the charge.
What is more striking is the general tone of optimism the Chinese feel about the future as their standard of living improves because of China's reliance on the global economy.
That optimism translates into general support for Beijing's Communist government, because it gets the credit for making people's lives better. But it also makes people more dependent on China maintaining a good relationship with the outside world, including the U.S.
In the end what one finds in China is a sense that there is much more to the relationship with the U.S. than diplomatic bluster and anti-American sloganeering. There is an oddly balanced relationship that reflects both Bush's and Clinton's outlooks. On one hand, there is a geopolitical competition; on the other, a burgeoning partnership built on trade, ambition and envy.
In one of the poorest counties of one of China's poorest western provinces, Gansu, children at the Da Ping elementary school learn in a classroom with pictures of two famous Chinese on the wall, neither of whom is Chairman Mao. They are a mathematician and a famous geologist, both of whom, the children are taught, were educated in the United States.
Teacher praises U.S. as model
"American science is very developed, and China should learn from it," said Zhou Ren, 32, the school's director.
The school, located in a tiny dustbowl of a valley 3 miles into the hills above the county seat, teaches children whose parents earn about $500 a year from farming. A few children walk two hours each way to and from school. No teachers are university-educated. No one has used a computer.
There are few complaints, however. The children are well-fed and life is space-age compared with the previous generation, when pupils had no desks and many lived in caves dug from the arid clay hills.
"I want my son to live a modern life," said Bao Xiao Jian, the 52-year-old headmaster, who compares his world to his childhood, when there was not enough to eat. "He'll keep going to school. I hope he owns his own car and has a nice apartment-everything good."
At this level of development, in villages and smaller cities among less educated people, knowledge of the U.S., and of the West in general, begins to tail off. People's favorite drink may be Coke or Sprite, but they don't stop to think that they are American products.
There also is little criticism of China's government. You hear little or nothing about human-rights violations from these people because they get most of their information from government-run newspapers. Unless an incident such as the razing of underground churches has happened locally, they won't know about it or think about it.
While they might not debate the future of democracy because Chinese authorities won't permit it, they also seem too caught up in one of the world's great economic success stories: from the depths of poverty to a near middle-class existence in one generation.
"If the government spends more time focusing on the economy and less on politics, that's good," said Wang Gang, 30, a doctor in the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing, who gave up his practice two years ago because civil servant pay was too low. He started an air-conditioning supply firm and now owns two cars and is shopping for a second condominium as an investment.
In Lanzhou, a third-tier city in the poorer western part of China, shipping company foreman Su Dong Chao, 41, lives a typical worker's life, but to him, without exaggeration or irony, it is "heaven on Earth."
He has an apartment in the city and a modest house in his home village where his wife farms. He owns all the appliances he needs, from a TV and videodisc player to a refrigerator. He eats at a restaurant every day. He supports the government because it has given him almost everything he desires, except for a vacation to Hong Kong, which he hopes to afford one day.
"When I was a child," he recalled, "we ate what we could get. Now it's difficult to decide what to eat because you have so many choices."
Not hungry for change
In Shanghai, the most sophisticated city in China on the mainland and its commercial hub, there is again a sense that the Chinese are not interested in confrontation, nor are they hungry for drastic political change. They whisper about some issues, including whether they agree with the Chinese government's crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement. But it also is easy to find people willing to share their views on politics.
At lunch with a group of employees of an American high-tech firm, what they want is for the U.S. to be patient with China as it evolves. These are people who speak English, travel abroad and make their livings off the global economy. But everyone at the table can tell past stories of family members and friends who earned barely enough to eat, or whose lives were ruined by the Cultural Revolution.
Compared with what China was, their lives already are rich and full of greater promise. They want nothing to jeopardize that.
"Look at India," said 34-year-old manager Cheng Gang. "They've got all kinds of freedoms and the reality is they are out of control."
"I respect the Communist Party," said Anita Zou, a young office assistant. "I don't want to see anything affect stability. It will lead us to a better life."