BEIJING -- When President Bill Clinton came to China in June 1998, Ma Nan was one of seven Beijing University students who asked him tough questions, challenging Clinton to explain what gives the United States the right to tell the Chinese how to live.
Because of their pro-Chinese assertiveness, Ma and her six schoolmates were branded nationalists in reports that followed the on-campus encounter. Some called them harbingers of a new generation of anti-American students and an indication of a shift away from China's fascination with the country known here as the "beautiful imperialist" -- perhaps even the beginning of long-term confrontation with the West.
But three years later, a look at Ma and her classmates, and at many other Chinese who have been categorized as nationalists, reveals a more complex picture, in which patriotic feelings for China coexist with admiration for the United States and its very different ways.
Ma, for instance, loves China without a doubt. But the 26-year-old master's degree candidate also plans to marry her American boyfriend. While she might defend her country, she is also a budding Buddhist, follows a vegetarian diet and values freedom, she says, "above all."
"I think calling me a nationalist was very strange," said Ma, whose long flowing dresses give her a New Age air. "It really didn't fit."
Ma's views, and those of people like her, reveal that many people here -- even so-called Chinese nationalists -- are still far from viewing the United States as an enemy, or even as a "strategic competitor," the term employed by President Bush. They also drive home another point: The nationalism or patriotism expressed by many Chinese does not necessarily spring from a love of China's political system, which concentrates power in the Communist Party.
"All of us want China to change and become a freer place," said Liu Lina, a graduate student in economics who in 1998 asked Clinton about U.S. human rights problems. "But we want to do it ourselves. We don't want you to tell us how.
"I like America's values, actually," she continued, describing New York as "cute," but confiding, "I like Boston a lot more. It's a place for real aristocrats."
China's relations with the United States constitute its most important foreign ties, and many Chinese view the United States not as a competitor but as a model for their own economic and political reforms.
Bilateral trade totaled $100 billion last year. American movies, music, books, magazines and fads regularly take China by storm. The restructured central bank looks a lot like the Federal Reserve; its debt-to-equity swap program for state-owned enterprises took a few pages from the U.S. Resolution Trust Corp., established to oversee the cleanup of failed savings and loan institutions. Parts of the new marriage law read like an American prenuptial agreement. Privatization is occurring all over, although political constraints prevent the government from embracing it.
But many young, educated Chinese, even those who profess to admire the United States, smart at what they feel are distorted American views on China. In particular, they decry what they see as U.S. attempts to categorize their country as a "bad" state, not to be trusted on the world stage, or as a "communist" country, mired in outdated ideology.
"I think I'm more open-minded than many Americans," said Liu, whose course work in economics has ranged from Marxism to Milton Friedman. "The things we have been exposed to during our education and the changes around us have made us a lot more flexible."
Ma said she believes Americans do not understand that Chinese society is vastly freer than the China of 20 years ago. Ma still chafes at the restrictions on freedom, but she chafes, too, at what she sees as unwillingness in Washington to recognize the changes.
Chinese views on the United States have evolved over the three decades since Americans and Chinese resumed contacts. But they have remained generally positive despite a long list of challenges, such as the April 1 collision of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane and a Chinese jet fighter near Hainan Island.
In the 1980s, many Chinese worshiped the United States, looking at American power and democratic values with wonder and envy. Liberal Chinese thinkers called upon the Chinese people to rejuvenate China by adopting Western models of modernization, including its political system.
"If you were an American at a university, you were immediately considered an expert. It didn't matter who you were," said Gao Liang, an economist who at the time was caught up in the pro-American fervor.
But following the 1989 crackdown on a student-led movement around Tiananmen Square, the government used its "patriotic education" campaign to raise doubts about the American system's relevance to China and about Washington's interest in allowing China to become strong. American actions, such as the forced boarding of the Chinese cargo ship Yinhe in 1993 on what proved to be a futile search for a poisonous gas shipment to Iran, contributed to the impression of the United States as a bully.
China's government-backed intellectuals churned out anti-American screeds typified by the 1996 bestseller, "The China That Can Say No." The United States, it predicted, will "inevitably face a fin de siecle type general squaring of accounts." America is "annoying yet futile, despicable yet pitiful, and has lost its future direction."
Moves in the United States perceived here as anti-Chinese added to the sense that the United States was not a benevolent factor in China's development. The Cox report on Chinese nuclear espionage, the Clinton campaign finance scandal and the Wen Ho Lee nuclear espionage case all contributed to a feeling that the United States sought to contain China's growing influence on the world stage.
Criticized for his support of the Tiananmen movement, Gao by 2001 had become a bit of a nationalist himself. Earlier this year he published a well-received essay in which he argued that China's aviation industry would be better off if it had less contact with foreign producers such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglas or Airbus.
The bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 and the spy plane collision were seen as turning points for Chinese views of the United States. Some Chinese and Western pundits predicted they would spark a backlash similar to the sudden eruption in anti-Chinese feelings in the United States caused by China's 1989 crackdown around Tiananmen Square.
Massive anti-American demonstrations rocked U.S. diplomatic installations in China after the bombing. Liu remembered being "incredibly angry" at the United States. But neither incident seems to have marked the kind of watershed expected by many here.
One explanation is that many Chinese have embraced a level of pragmatism about their country's relations with the United States. Like many Chinese, for instance, Ma and Liu do not believe the American explanation that the Belgrade embassy bombing was accidental. But nor did they -- like many other Chinese -- buy the explanations churned out by China's media.
"In the end, I ended up believing no one," said Huang Guohua, a 22-year-old economics student.