By Tom Plate

Bush wisely extends a long-pined-for photo opportunity to outgoing President Jiang Zemin: moseying on down to the Bush ranch in Texas and flipping a steer burger or two on the barbecue.

Extreme conservatives would have you simply bomb 'em; extreme liberals would simply have you love 'em.

Real life, though, often comes down to a difficult choice between questionable alternatives. And when the issue has to do with relating to more than 1.3 billion people, perhaps the only sane choice is somewhere in between: Try to live with them in peace as best you can by understanding them as best you can.

In this spirit, try for a moment to forget what you have read about China in the western media. You know, the predictable stuff: the locked-up dissidents, the intimidation of critics (abroad as well as at home), the unsubtle party propaganda machine, the military's macho muscle-flexing over Taiwan.

President Bush led Chinese President Jiang Zemin into Bush's ranch home in Crawford, Texas on Friday. Jiang will step down in 2003 to make way for the next generation of Chinese leaders. Associated Press

Now, let's understand exactly about whom we are talking: Jiang Zemin, 76 and not a day younger. This outgoing president of China is no portrait of eternal elegance. With his unpatrician Mandarin patois and his shovel-and-boots engineer's education, his speeches betray neither the eloquence of a Churchill nor his thought the subtlety of a Nehru.

But there is more to this former mayor of Shanghai (which, after recently reacquired Hong Kong, is China's most westernized city) than meets the eye — or ear. And this is why President Bush was bang-on to have offered Jiang the dream photo op for which he has long pined: an invitation to mosey down to the ranch in Texas and flip a steer burger or two on the barbecue. Only Bush's fourth guest so far — after Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah — Jiang is his most important to date.

It is this middle-class backyard-barbeque image, of course, that the crafty handlers of Jiang so want to stick on the world's memory board as he nears the end of the long transition march to 2003, when power may move to the next generation of Chinese leaders. Image is not everything, of course.

Barbeques won't be sufficient to deflect Jiang and his inner circle from shaping policies in their own national interests (probably forever nationalistic on Taiwan, not so much that way on Tibet, where compromise may be in the air).

But these latter-day Communists are not doctrinal purists; many would blush (privately) at the absurd proposition that Mao's "Little Red Book" can remotely compete with Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" as the better contemporary economic road map. That's why even as his putative successors are looking to come to power, Jiang and his crowd aren't simply going to go away: It tells you a lot, for instance, that two of his fiercest loyalists are getting top jobs in the party's Central Committee. Thus, Hu Jintao, 59, is to inherit the throne, but when he looks over his shoulder, he will see Jiang hovering about like a self-appointed guardian angel.

Or perhaps senior minister: For the Chinese, we now understand, are eager for a seamless, global confidence-building transfer of power; they are keenly aware that bloodless change has been far from the norm in Chinese politics.

Indeed, colossal wastes of human talent (the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the Tiananmen massacre) have been staples of China's unhealthy political diet. That sort of messiness is not good for the economy or for Chinese "bidness," as they say in Texas.

The Chinese want no more nonsense. That's why, in organizing Jiang's transition, they have taken a leaf from the nation-building page of Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister of Singapore, a city-state whose success the Chinese greatly respect. After fully three decades in power (much longer than Jiang), Lee carefully prepared a proper and peaceful transition that would ensure power for the younger generation.

So did Lee then simply disappear into the humid Singaporean sunset, never to be heard from again? Not on your life: A new position was created. They called it senior minister. Guess who got it? And so they call him senior minister today.

None of this transition haiku, as it were, was lost on China's elders, many of whom went through the God-awful Cultural Revolution and would rather have to eat Japanese food the rest of their lives than go through that again.

To be sure, out of respect for Singapore, and out of their own political uniqueness and arrogance, China's new leaders are not likely to refer to Jiang as China's "senior minister." But that's the unspoken truth behind the smiles and steer burgers of those Texas-sized photo ops.

Just don't call him Senior Minister Jiang, please.

Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.