BEIJING: Three events during US President George W. Bush's first-term appear to have changed his relationship with China, prompting President Hu Jintao on Thursday to promise the continuation of "constructive cooperation" with the man Beijing has criticized for his "poor diplomacy".

Bush entered his first term with an election pledge to approach China as a "strategic competitor", rather than the "strategic partner" of the previous Clinton administration. The confrontational language soon vanished.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and the subsequent US-led global war on terrorism shook up US relations with China and many other countries. In October 2001, in their first meeting since Bush took office, he and former Chinese President Jiang Zemin pledged to stand "side by side" in the fight against terrorism.

"The Bush administration has obviously shifted its policy from containment to cooperation after the September 11 attacks," the government-run Beijing Review magazine said in a preview of Jiang's visit to Washington in October 2002.

Up to then, China had been highly critical of a perceived move towards US unilateralism since Bush took office. It accused the United States of taking "unilateral military actions that totally violate the United Nations charter and security council resolutions" by repeatedly bombing Iraq in early 2001.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell sees the row over espionage that erupted in April 2001, when a US spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter over the South China Sea, as an earlier turning point in relations with Beijing.

"Everybody thought, 'That's it. We're into a deep freeze'," Powell told the Far Eastern Economic Review in an interview published last week.

But the urgency of solving the initial stand-off over the plane forced the two sides to agree on mechanisms that could be used to handle similar diplomatic spats, Powell told the magazine. Since then, on "issue after issue over the last four years, we've never had a problem communicating with them or getting an answer from them, and it was always a straight answer", he said.

The third episode that completed the transition to a highly flexible, pragmatic Sino-US relationship was the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

China is one of five veto-holding permanent members of the UN Security Council, with the United States, Russia, Britain and France. It opposed war in Iraq but was less vociferous in its opposition than France, Russia and Germany.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, China criticized Bush for labelling North Korea, Iran and Iraq part of an "axis of evil" in his February 2002 State of the Union speech. "The Chinese side does not advocate the using of such terms in international relations," a foreign ministry spokesman said in response to the speech.

The criticism of Bush's diplomatic skills followed Jiang accusing him of "wantonly widening the targets of terrorism", in apparent reference to US plans to take military action in Iraq and other nations.

New President Hu Jintao has made no similar comments since he replaced Jiang as state leader in March 2003 and as head of the ruling Communist Party in November 2002. The "best ever" message on diplomatic ties is likely to be heard again later this month in Chile, where Hu and Bush are expected to meet on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

Many Chinese analysts believe trade and anti-terrorism cooperation have forced China and the United States to shelve long-term disputes over issues such as human rights and Taiwan.

They say China needs a stable relationship with the US to help its internal economic and political stability. The US is already China's biggest trading partner and it expects to continue to profit from China joining the World Trade Organization in December 2001.

Yet the expressions of unanimity may not fully reflect Beijing's position. On the eve of Wednesday's election, China's foreign ministry distanced itself from a commentary written by a former top diplomat, Qian Qichen, who criticized Bush for his "catastrophic", unilateralist foreign policy.

Qian accused Bush of using a doctrine based on force. "It advocates the United States should rule over the whole world with overwhelming force, military force in particular," he was quoted as saying.

In Iraq and elsewhere, the Bush administration was "practising the same catastrophic strategy applied by former empires in history", he said. Qian's comments were published by the official China Daily and People's Daily newspapers.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said the article, written last month, was not intended for publication in the two newspapers. Internet links to Qian's commentary were blocked or removed.

But another commentary published on November 1 by People's Daily, the party mouthpiece, accused Bush of "arrogance" and "complete failure" in diplomacy.

"Terrorism has rebounded seriously worldwide in recent years, (and) the development of the situation in the Middle East region is beyond the US government's expectation," said the commentary, which appeared under the name Liao Hongbin.

Bush's insistence that he was correct to go to war in Iraq had "further laid bare US arrogant features", Liao said.

He said the cause of the United States' "poor international image ... lies in the irrationality of US foreign policy".-dpa