On July 28, 1976 at 3:42 A.M., an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale shook Tangshan, a coal mining town to the east of Beijing. Sixteen hours later another 7.8 trembler rocked Tangshan again. Chinese official sources say 242,000 died, making the Great Tangshan Quake the deadliest earthquake of the 20th century and the third deadliest of all time.

To the Chinese, however, the Tangshan Quake didn't just spell disaster, it augured change. Six weeks later (on Sept. 2), Chairman Mao died, ending the Cultural Revolution and sparking a battle to change China won ultimately by Deng Xiaoping. Two other major Communist figures had already "gone to meet Marx" that year.

Natural disasters in China mean more than they do in the West. Many Chinese hold a view that the government is responsible for maintaining the harmony under heaven. If the earth buckles and shakes, it's a harbinger of political or social upheaval.

China's Communist government spent decades trying to stamp out superstitions and feudal beliefs such as these, but it has failed. The last two decades of economic reform have sparked an explosion of traditional beliefs and a renewed interest in Chinese Buddhist-like sects. In recent years, even senior Party officials embraced traditional creeds, the precepts of feng shui, and qi gong. (China's current president Hu Jintao talks about the creation of a "harmonious" society - a clear nod to Chinese traditional views.) I've met spiritual advisers to senior Chinese officials (Nancy Reagan and her palm reader, anyone?). I met one of them at a boozy evening in Beijing, introduced to me by a senior official in China's ministry of foreign trade. I still have the King of Clubs he gave me for good luck.

So, now, we have the deadly earthquake in Sichuan. So far, at least 8,500 are believed dead. Six thousand soldiers from the People's Liberation Army have been dispatched into the area to help with rescue operations. And already I have notes from several friends wondering is this dynasty next.

While its propaganda machine might be sounding a little shrill lately, China's foreign policy is hitting all the right notes. In the past few weeks, President Hu Jintao has met twice with leading politicians from Taiwan following the election of Ma Ying-jeou. First Hu met with VP-elect Vincent Siew and then with KMT bigwig Lien Chan. There's a good possibility that the two sides will move a lot closer -- setting up direct flights and freight services -- once Ma takes power on May 20 and Taiwan's both incompetent and ideologically rigid president, Chen Shui-bian, leaves. Good for China and Taiwan.

What's more, last week, Hu spent five days in Japan using "smile" diplomacy with China's Asian nemesis. By all accounts, it was a pretty successful trip, a stark contrast to complete disaster that occurred when Hu's predecessor Jiang Zemin visited Japan in 1998 and gave a screaming lecture about history. The lecture played well in China but not anywhere else. China and Japan have reason to buddy up. Last year, China replaced the US as Japan's biggest export market - a trend that isn't going to change.

Then, last weekend in Shenzhen, lower ranking Chinese officials met with representatives of the Dalai Lama. They've agreed to keep talking. No one expects this to go anywhere, but it's a whole lot better than yelling at each other via the media.

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Every election cycle, somebody likes to bash China. (Remember Bill Clinton accusing George Bush of coddling “butchers in Beijing”?) China is an easy target, and bashing it is fun because it’s so much simpler to blame foreigners for our troubles than to focus on our own issues. But more broadly, I think, making a case for relations with China is tough for politicians who feel the need to dumb-down their rhetoric and identify an enemy.

Let’s take Hillary Clinton as an example. After mowing down NAFTA, Clinton has now turned her anti-aircraft heavy machine gun toward China. Here are a few snippets from her campaign:

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Move over ugly American, make room for the ugly Chinese.

In Seoul on Sunday, groups of Chinese students accosted protesters demonstrating against China's treatment of North Korean refugees and Beijing's policies in Tibet. The attacks by the Chinese occurred as the Olympic torch wended its way on its seemingly never-ending journey around the world. The South Korean government was justifiably angry. China, after initially denying the events occurred, has now taken steps to still the waters. But the damage has been done. China's angry youth - called "fen qing" in Chinese - are ruining their country's reputation around the world and spelling the end of a decade-long honeymoon that the world has had with China.

The flare-up was the latest deeply troubling and profoundly weird event to mar the globe-trotting journey of the torch, which the Beijing government has dubbed "the sacred flame." (Remember, these dudes are officially atheists.) Before Seoul, we had Chinese cops in blue and white tracksuits manhandling demonstrators in Paris and London; we had a Chinese woman in the United States who participated in a pro-Tibet protest being identified on a listserv run by Chinese students; now her parents are on the run in China and her high school in Qingdao has revoked her diploma; and we've witnessed the incessant hounding of Tibetan and other speakers on US campuses by Chinese students. In cities around the world, the Chinese embassy has fanned the passions of the "angry youth" by encouraging them to demonstrate, handing out T-shirts and flags.

While I have no problem with displays of patriotic feeling, the only thing these "angry youth" are accomplishing is turning the world away from China. And they are not alone in this ill-fated effort to get China's point across. China's propaganda machine is also seriously in need of repairs.

For a few years there, the tone adopted by spokespeople of China's government was downright suave. Background briefings. Check. A quiet drink with journalists. Check. Even a bowling event without a government minder. Check. But these days, it seems like someone has disinterred Cultural Revolution propagandist and Gang of Four member Zhang Chunqiao and put him at the helm.

After the March riots in Tibet, the Tibetan government proclaimed a "people's war" against "splittism" (somebody should really tell them to lose that word) and the party boss there called the Dalai Lama "a jackal clothed in a monk's robes, and a vicious devil who is a beast in human form." A few days later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "disgusting." And the amazing thing was the Chinese expected to be taken seriously.

Finally, there's China's "ship of shame" - packed with arms for the government of Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe - on its own troubled journey to first South Africa and now Angola. In both places, dock workers refused to unload the weapons. It's a coincidence but also a bad one because China has been focusing a lot of diplomatic capital on improving its ties to Africa and the rest of the Third World.

What does this all mean for China? To me, it means the end of an era of China's "soft power."

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Two events in the last day show a lot about how to and how not to deal with China.

First, according to the official Xinhua News Agency on Thursday, China will be resuming talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama. Good news. And a smart move on China’s part that was taken, no doubt, because of substantial Western pressure. I’m doubtful it’s going to go anywhere; partially because of the Dalai Lama (more on that below), but the move shows something important to the “Chinese never respond to pressure” school of diplomacy, popular among some China buffs in Washington or around the globe.

China does respond to pressure; obviously, it needs to be consistent, rationale, not shrill and focused. But China does respond. (For another example, look at China’s exchange rate. The greenback dropped below 7 yuan for the first time since the ‘90s earlier this month. The Chinese have quietly revalued their currency – again due to Western pressure. Now why wasn’t pressure supposed to work again?)

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Just how scary is Chinese nationalism? Just how serious are the thousands of Chinese about boycotting Carrefour - France's version of a big box store with more than 100 outlets in China?

On May 8, 1999, hours after US missiles slammed into the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, I was out on the streets of Beijing near the US embassy as a line of buses disgorged hundreds, if not thousands of students. A Chinese researcher rode up to me on his bike. It's the Boxers, he said, referring to the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century. The Boxers killed their share of foreigners and believed that bodies hardened by lotsa kung-fu fighting could stop bullets. I laughed. Then a brick whizzed past my head.

Still, I've never really been able to take China nationalism that seriously. It's like some of the comments on my blog. There's no shortage of passion but it's also curiously skin deep. It's often a foil for anti-government feelings, employed by Chinese who are actually fed up with Communist Party rule but aren't allowed to say it. Finally, it often masks deeper divisions in Chinese society. Whenever I read a Chinese blogger urging an anti-foreign boycott or some other type of joint action, I'm reminded of the telling saying that Chinese have about themselves. "A Chinese alone equals the power of a dragon, but three Chinese, nothing but an insect."

Militant nationalism is a loaded term; it raises the specter of 1930s Germany and Japan. Scholars and pundits on all sides of the political divide in America like to toss it around when speaking about China. On the panda hugging side of the aisle, they invoke "militant nationalism" when they argue that we shouldn't be tough on China. "Don't push those Chinese because they might get ultra-nationalist on you," they warn, taking their talking points almost directly from friends in China's party-state. The right, too, loves to fan the flames of our fears. China's ultra-nationalists are coming, it warns, so we need to bolster our military forces, arm Taiwan, harden Guam, snuggle up even closer to Japan.... Both lines of reasoning are flawed, I think. Here's why.

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For better or worse, it's safe to say that we're at the doorstep of a new era of China bashing in the West. The post-Tiananmen Square crackdown honeymoon where the zeitgeist was "we can all get rich together" is over. It's been replaced by China = bad guy.

Across the Western democracies - from the U.S. to Britain, France, Italy, Germany, a fear of China is rising and shows no signs of abating. A new poll by Harris, released Wednesday by the Financial Times, indicates that China has overtaken the U.S. as the biggest threat to global stability in the eyes of Europeans.

“The story of the last five years has been about economic opportunities," said Mark Leonard, executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author of What Does China Think? told the FT. "The story of the last six months has been about China as a threat in Darfur and in Tibet."

That story is pretty much the same in the U.S. Last month, Gallup reported that after three years of relatively mixed views toward China, Americans have turned sharply negative against the Middle Kingdom. In that poll, China replaced North Korea (anyone remember the Axis of Evil?) as one of the top three U.S. enemies - after Iran and Iraq. And that poll was taken before Tibet was engulfed in protests and the Olympic torch relay morphed into a circus.

But it's not just in polls where you sense the shifting zeitgeist. Even a casual peruser of the editorial pages of leading American newspapers - or shows such as CNN's The Situation Room where Jack Cafferty recently described Chinese products as "junk" and called China's government "a bunch of goons and thugs" -- can figure out that it's open season on China. Same holds true in a new crop of thrillers where Chinese villains have replaced old Soviets, those feline French and wild-eyed terrorists as the rogues du jour. Check out NY Times reporter Alex Berenson's "The Ghost War" or Colin Harrison's "The Finder," both published this year. It's not quite Yellow Peril time, but ....

A few years ago, China's sizzling economy was viewed as an opportunity. Now, perhaps because we're flirting with a recession, it's a threat. In terms of a challenge from Asia, China circa 2008 is the new Japan circa 1980.

On the military side, China is the new Soviet Union. A few years ago analysts generally pooh-poohed China's modernization. "The Million Man Swim" was how one analyst described a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan. Not any longer. China's military (which has been rewarded with double-digit budget increases every year except one since 1989) can now shoot satellites out of the sky and has begun to roam the high seas.

When it comes to human rights, again, China is the new USSR.

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A lot of ink has been spilled, and rightly so, on Tibet. But is it possible that the bigger story happening in Asia right now is what's going on between China and its other unruly relative - Taiwan? Is it also possible that the troubles in Tibet could be setting the scene for faster breakthroughs vis-a-vis Taiwan? I think so.

Here's why.

Over the weekend China's president, the purposely boring Hu Jintao, met with the purposely boring vice-president elect of Taiwan, Vincent "Smiling" Siew, in the purposely sleazy resort province of Hainan in southern China. The meeting amounted to the highest-level contact between officials from Taipei and Beijing, which claims that Taiwan is part of China, since 1949 - the year when China's Communists won a civil war and the defeated Nationalists scurried to Taiwan. More recently, the two sides have had no substantial talks in eight years.

The Post briefed the meeting in our Sunday paper. The Times filed something on its website today in a piece that argued the planned dialogue won't amount to much because the Tibet situation would constrain China's leaders on any openings with Taiwan. Just the opposite, I think.

The election last month of Siew and Ma Ying-jeou, the Nationalist candidate for president, in Taiwan means that after eight years of failed leadership by President Chen Shui-bian, who bungled the island's security and its economy, relations between Taipei and Beijing are likely to improve. Leaders from the two sides are finally talking about establishing direct flights. (It takes a day to get from Taipei to Shanghai, home to 250,000 businessmen, right now. If the flights were direct, it'd take an hour.) Pres-elect Ma has said he wants to end most restrictions on Taiwanese investment in China. (A recognition of reality considering Taiwan's businessmen have already sunk $100 billion or so in mainland factories.)

This is good news, but not just for the economy of the region. It's also good news for those who care about the preservation of the world's only majority-Chinese democracy (Taiwan) and the prospect of political change in China.

Why?

For eight years, outgoing President Chen basically advocated that Taiwan declare independence from China. He couldn't say it openly because 1) China threatened to fire missiles at Taiwan if Taiwan took such an act (...not fun) and 2) the United States, which is obligated to (kind of) defend Taiwan under the very ambiguously worded Taiwan Relations Act, has told Taiwan that if it declared independence we probably wouldn't be overly eager to run to its defense. So Chen resorted to a policy of what the Chinese liked to call "creeping independence" which basically meant seizing every opportunity to enrage Beijing. In the end, however, Chen - and Taiwan -- didn't get bupkis. Taiwan failed to improve its security. And China had a strong argument against any kind of democratization. Look at Taiwan, Beijing's mandarins would say, they have democracy and they want to split the motherland! That's a powerful argument over there.

So enter Ma, the Harvard-educated pretty boy of the National Party. He turned his strategy 180 degrees from Chen's. Needlessly antagonizing China, he's said, makes no sense. The keys to Taiwan's security and - critically - to the preservation of its full-throated democracy, he argued, are good relations with Beijing, not the constant tension Chen seemed to crave. This type of thinking upset some in Washington who frame dealing with China in a smart (and somewhat complex) way with Panda-hugging or collaboration with the godless Commies. But I think that Ma is right.

The reason is that as long as Taiwan stops purposely pissing off China, most of the Communist leadership will be happy to let the whole issue of Taiwan's sovereignty float for decades as long as everybody is making money. That will boost Taiwan's economy, grant China time to change and decrease the possibility that the US will have to go to war to defend Taiwan. This peaceful interim will also give Taiwan time to push China's political system in the right direction.

And that's a key here. The only territory in the world with the capability to teach China about democracy is Taiwan. It won't be Hong Kong, which was, is and will always be just a glitzy colony - whether to the old rulers, the Brits, or the new ones, the Chinese. It's definitely not the West. If there's anything the Tibet situation has shown it's that the gap in understanding between us and China is vast and growing bigger.

But once China's propaganda czars can no longer paint Taiwan's democracy with the tar brush of "splittism" or "treason" (which they gleefully did while Chen was president), its political system will become a lot more attractive to the Chinese.

Now, how does Tibet play into this?

China's president Hu has already pretty much ruled out any major breakthroughs with the Dalai Lama. China's state-run media have reverted to propaganda from the Cultural Revolution with a 9/11 twist, describing Tibet's spiritual leader as a "jackal" in a monk's habit and a "terrorist."

But Beijing is desperate for some type of international breakthrough to show the world in this, its Olympic, year. Why not Taiwan? Arguments that flexibility on Taiwan would be impossible because it'd be inconsistent with toughness on Tibet don't wash. When the chips are down (and they are down for China right now), expediency wins. Taiwan could be the beneficiary. And that'd be good news.

Does the West have a new secret weapon in dealing with China in the person of Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister of Australia?

Rudd is the only Western leader who speaks Chinese, and his Chinese is pretty good at that. But deeper still is Rudd's understanding of China.

Australian China scholar Geremie Barme unpacks Rudd's marvelous speech, given at Beijing University last week, in which he bluntly called on China to recognize its human rights problems in Tibet.

Most Western leaders probably would have either punted or come on too strong. Rudd's tone, however, was pitch perfect.

Rudd's brilliance in the speech involves turning the Chinese term "friend" on its head. Friend (pengyou in Chinese) and frienship (youyi) are two of the most distorted concepts in modern China culture. In modern China, a friend is someone who will do you favors and who expects favors in return. A "foreign friend" is someone the Chinese party-state expects will carry water for them and NEVER criticize them.

Whenever a Chinese official called me "foreign friend" (waiguo pengyou), I knew some type of horrible deal would soon be asked or expected of me.

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