By Li Hongmei People's Daily Online

Even if President Barack Obama reiterated on the just wrapped-up Japan leg of his Asia trip that the U.S. would not contain China's expansion, in actuality, the monolithic super power has never put down its vigilance against China's rise. In its 2009 National Intelligence Strategy Report released not long ago, China was still characterized as a "threat" and a potential foe in addition to Iran, Iraq and Russia.

One of the U.S. most influential diplomats-- Morton I Abramowitz, who has also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for inter-American, East Asian and Pacific Affairs, used to stress pointedly that the U.S., while seeking cooperation with China, should by no means abandon its ideology and commitment to its allies, its remonstration leverage with China, and readiness to collide with China once the U.S. interests are found threatened.

Even today, when Obama administration is trying to convince the world it will usher in "change" and start afresh, the U.S. still hesitates to really cast away the assumption of "China Threat". As a matter of fact, Obama's unfolding Asian trip is designed not only to shore up American power in the region, but to define a new direction for its Asian alliance, and more important, to seek China's "strategic reassurance", or rather, to secure China's promise not to compete with the U.S. for influence in the Asian-Pacific Region which has seen a steady rise of the Chinese clout.

The concept of "strategic reassurance" was raised by James Steinberg, US Deputy Secretary of State, in his speech delivered last month, in which he outlined several areas where China needs to clarify its intentions. On the surface, the concept appears not so aggressive as the idea of "Responsible Stakeholder", put forward by then-Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, urging China to become a "responsible stakeholder." But in essence, the two are just the same stuff with different labels.

First, the pair of much debated concepts are born of one strategy----setting a limit on China's rise and growth by offering definitions and assessments of China's role in the international system. This also reflects the paradox in American logic: on the one hand, it needs China's leverage to combat the thorny problems facing all like climate change, nuclear threat and terrorism; while on the other hand, it will be on guard against China's rise as a global power which they fear would overshadow the U.S.

Seen more specifically, the concept of "Responsible Stakeholder" is a scorecard by which the U.S. measures China's progress in its willingness to contribute to international public good; while the idea of "strategic reassurance" seems to focus more on the process of mutual accommodation and dialogue on overlapping interests. The latter can be viewed as a comparatively equal contract binding to both parties. Thereby, "strategic reassurance", if it acts as a new framework for policy making, will positively lay the foundation for a relatively solid and cooperative China-US relationship.

Unfortunately, both concepts highlight only the demands from the U.S. side upon China, but play down the commitments from the U.S., which are invariably subject to change with time and situation. And meantime, the U.S. has all along been trying to grip the right to interpret for all the issues covered under. For instance, the U.S. claims itself to be free of China's internal affairs and also states it has no intention to challenge China's sovereignty, while it shows concerns only about the religious and ethnic problems. This interpretation made by the U.S. as its standard practice is too ambiguous to show how things actually stand.

Generally speaking, the plural make-up of the U.S. society determines that its foreign policies must give consideration to all the interests groups. On this basis, Obama's endeavor to upgrade the Sino-U.S. relations and further the bilateral cooperation will not stray from the limitations of its traditional China policy---which mean that its cooperation with China is also confined to the scope that would help the U.S. struggle out of the economic mire and remain as a dominant power and no further. This is also where the geopolitical significance lies when the U.S. decided to recalibrate its attention upon Asian-Pacific Region.

Evidently, Obama's China trip is not merely to seek china's "strategic reassurance," but more to demonstrate a fact that the U.S. has always kept a vigilant eye on China's rise.