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.

Commentators across the political spectrum have suggested that a profoundly confrontational clash between western and traditional cultures is taking place. Are modernity & religiosity in fundamental conflict? Are western values - equated with modernity and secularism - incompatible with orthodoxy? Are traditions - based in religion and emphasizing the importance of established practices - antithetical to "progress"? Is the conflict so profound that it has become our new "cold war"? Join our panelists to explore one of the more disturbing challenges facing our world today.

Coit D. Blacker is director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He also serves as co-chair for Stanford University's International Initiative. Professor Blacker is the author or editor of seven books and monographs, including Hostage to Revolution: Gorbachev and Soviet Security Policy, 1985-91 (1993); Reluctant Warriors: The United States, the Soviet Union and Arms Control (1987); and, with Gloria Duffy, International Arms Control: Issues and Agreements (1984). During the first Clinton administration, Professor Blacker served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council. Professor Blacker is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B., Political Science) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., M.A.L.D., Ph.D.).

Amir Eshel is chair and associate professor of German studies and comparative literature, and director of the European Forum at FSI. His research focuses on German culture, comparative literature, and German-Jewish history and culture from the Enlightenment to the present. He is currently working on a book about the poetic figuration of historical narratives, and he is also involved in an interdisciplinary project on urban space in Berlin. At Stanford, he has taught courses on German Jewish literature, literature of the Holocaust, modern German poetry and the contemporary German novel. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1998 as an assistant professor of German studies, he taught at the Universitaet Hamburg (Germany). He is a member of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association of Jewish studies, the German Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. In 2002 he received the Award for Distinguished Teaching, from Stanford University's dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. He received an MA and PhD in German literature, both from the Universitat Hamburg. He speaks Hebrew, German and English, and has a good knowledge of Yiddish and French.

Robert Gregg is the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor in Religious Studies (Emeritus), and serves as Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. His scholarship includes a book on philosophies concerning death and grieving in ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian communities; two volumes concerning struggles over orthodoxy and heresy in 4th century Christianity that are focused on the "arch-heretic" Arius and reactions to his teachings; a translation of Athanasius' Greek Life of Saint Antony - the famous account of his activities as one of the first desert monks; and a study of 250 Greek, Hebrew/Aramaic, and Latin inscriptions from the Golan that allow glimpses of interactions between Jews, "pagans," and Christians in the Golan Heights and Syria, 1st-7th centuries CE. Professor Gregg's current research treats several "sacred stories" which appear both in the Bible and in the Qur'an-and examines interpretations of these scripture narratives by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers and graphic artists in each of the religions' early centuries.

Paula M. L. Moya is Associate Professor and Vice-Chair of English at Stanford University, where she recently completed a term as Director of the Undergraduate Program of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), and Chair of the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) major. Her publications include essays on feminist theory, multicultural pedagogy, and Latina/o and Chicana/o literature and identity. She is the author of Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (University of California Press, 2002) and coeditor of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (University of California Press, 2000) and Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave in 2006.) For the past five years, she has been actively involved as a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society. For more information, visit www.fmsproject.cornell.edu.

Raena D. Saddler grew up in St. Louis and attended high school at Colorado Academy in Denver. She is currently a Junior double-majoring in Religious Studies (with a focus on Christianity) and Psychology on the "Health and Development" specialization track (focusing both on adolescent development and clinical psychology). She is also minoring in International Relations with a focus on aid to lesser developed countries--Africa in particular. Raena is planning to spend next fall semester in Rome and come back to work on an honors paper for Religious Studies. She enjoys traveling abroad, and spends a few weeks every summer doing aid-work in Mozambique, Africa. Since coming to Stanford, Raena has been volunteering for three years at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church (MPPC) working with junior high and high school girls as a youth leader and small group leader. In addition to that, she is the head coach for the Menlo-Atherton High School JV women's lacrosse team. Outside of coaching she loves to be around kids and babysits for several families in the area. When she isn't going to class, babysitting, or coaching, she spends the rest of her time with her closest friends and boyfriend of two years.She is very passionate about youth leadership and social justice, and hopes to work for an international aid organization in the future.

Jointly sponsored by the Stanford International Initiative and the Undergraduate Admissions Office.