April 18, 2001

Despite friction, US-China are bound together
Two peoples share everyday ties

By Steve Friess
Special for USA TODAY

SHANGHAI -- At the moment, the Chinese seem to despise the USA, but they still love Big Macs.

At the very same moment, Americans seem to loathe China but adore the cheap, Chinese-made sundries on sale at Wal-Mart.

This curious and inextricable connection between the USA and China is something both obvious and overlooked as the publics of both nations contemplate what happens at today's talks over the South China Sea air collision April 1.

On the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, it is difficult to find a native who, if asked, isn't outraged that the United States sent a surveillance plane so close to their shores -- and then blamed their now-canonized fighter pilot for the midair collision in which he died. However, they are not so angry that they will skip the opportunity to form a block-long line on a recent cold, rainy Shanghai evening to get into Pizza Hut.

And in America, amid fire-breathing declarations from various lawmakers and overheated banter on talk radio, few suggest that the United States actually pull out of the market and leave behind the $52 billion in cheap goods it purchased last year from China.

China is fourth on the list of top U.S. trading partners, trailing Canada, Mexico and Japan.

''I don't think Americans realize how many things they get from China nowadays, how much of their everyday lives and economic situations are affected by this country,'' says Desmond Wong, partner and China point man for accounting giant Ernst & Young, which is based in Chicago. The firm has 2,600 employees in China.

Even if average Americans are vaguely aware of the economic connections from those ''Made in China'' tags on their dolls and T-shirts, most probably have no idea how much Western culture and academia have become a part of China. Shanghai, the nation's economic hub, boasts a skyline so Manhattan-like that the 1,500-foot-tall Oriental Pearl TV Tower might be the only way for an observer to tell that it is in Asia.

It is not just a visual trick. Consider:

• McDonald's had 326 restaurants here at the end of 2000, up from 62 in 1995. China has several Starbucks franchises, including one in Beijing's Forbidden City. Kenny Rogers Roasters is so popular that one store in Beijing has a live band.
• About 54,000 Chinese are studying at American colleges and universities. Among the alumni: Chinese President Jiang Zemin's eldest son. Webster University in St. Louis has a Shanghai campus.
• More than 4,000 Chinese infants and children were adopted into American families in 2000.
• The National Basketball Association broadcasts games live seven days a week on Chinese TV. Children are so smitten with the sport that they write the initials ''NBA'' on snow-covered basketball courts in the winter. The NBA, in turn, welcomed Wang Zhizhi, its first Chinese player, to the Dallas Mavericks this month.
• More than 1,000 U.S. companies employ more than 100,000 Chinese people, a figure likely to skyrocket if China joins the World Trade Organization. When a major Internet cable was severed in the Pacific Ocean in February, the main hue and cry came not from big businesses, but from ordinary Chinese and Americans who were suddenly without a vital link to one another. Major corporations got around the breach via satellites and other technology; the rest of the community agonized through a two-week near-outage that interfered with scholarly research and students' e-mail.

''There is no way to separate these two countries,'' says Chinese journalist Rui Chenggang, an anchor for a state-run 24-hour English TV news station that made its debut recently. ''There is too much between us.''

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