The nation's leaders expressed their strong condolences for the September 11 suicide hijack attacks, but that was the easy part. They've also condemned terrorism and vowed in general, flowery terms to support international efforts to squelch it.

But even as Bush insists there's no grey area, the Chinese see lots of it. After years of carefully developing its alliances and positioning itself as the focal point of Asian politics and economics, China faces a suddenly reshuffled world order in which a favorite neighbor, Pakistan, is about to permit a US military presence on its soil.

This is hardly a scenario China could have predicted, but officials find themselves unable to demand the US stay out of their backyard if evidence shows Afghanistan guest Osama bin Laden masterminded the horrific slaughter of thousands in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington.

As a result, the thrust of Chinese input into the response is to urge caution and call for the outcome to be orchestrated by the United Nations, not a US-led coalition. That message is likely the one Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan gives US Secretary of State Colin Powell when they meet sometime in the next few days.

"Going through the UN would give China veto power in whatever happened," said Rajan Menon, international studies expert at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. "But I don't think the US will allow the Russians and the Chinese to pick apart their plans here."

China has plenty to worry about with US at war just across its borders, especially if that war takes on an anti-Islam bent that angers its large Muslim separatist minority in the far northwest Chinese region of Xinjiang. Those Muslims, of an ethnicity known as the Uygurs, have engineered bus explosions and other violent acts to support their separatist efforts, and some are rumored to have spent time in terrorist training camps run by the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan.

"China must be concerned about a backlash in radical Islam and a spillover effect of refugees from Afghanistan if there's a war there," said Dru Gladney, political science professor at the University of Hawaii and author of "Chinese Muslims, Ethnic Nationalism and the People's Republic."

Also disconcerting to China is a Pakistan-US alliance that forces China to suddenly worry about US influence from its western front.

"China has a fear that the US is trying to encircle it," said Evan Medeiros, a fellow at the Monterery Institute of International Studies in Monterery, Calif. "The US has improved its relations with South Korea and Japan and made efforts through arms sales with Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore to gain influence on China's other sides, too. The western flank was the side it figured it was safe on."

Still, as disconcerting as the situation may be for China, there are some positive outcomes that could come if the US stays in the region only long enough to snuff out terrorism and bring those behind the Sept. 11 events to justice.

Should China be seen as cooperative with the US, for example, it could prove healthy for Sino-US relations. Already, with the US and its people now focused on terrorism, they may stop obsessing over the so-called China threat.

"I hope my government actually gets involved in this coalition to fight against international terrorism because it's a good opportunity for China to improve Sino-US relations and polish its international image," said Zhu Feng, director of the International Security Program at Peking University.

That could be a positive outcome, but it also may lead the US to overlook human rights abuses, some fear. China may even use the world's obsession with terrorism as an excuse to further crackdown on the Uygurs.

"They characterize all unrest in Xinjiang as terrorist or separatist even when it isn't," said Sophia Woodman, research director for the New York-based group Human Rights in China. "Theres been some contradictory interpretations of the emphasis of (Foreign Ministry spokesman) Zhu Bangzao said on these issues, and some people interpreted that he was trying to link China's battle against its ethnic minorities to the global anti-terrorism struggle."

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