WASHINGTON (Reuters) – From the power centers of Washington to a soybean farm in Iowa and on to sunny Southern California, China’s president-in-waiting, Xi Jinping, will sample diverse slices of America during a major visit next week.

But as the man who is set to run China until 2023 takes measure of the United States, he will be sized up not only by Americans but – and perhaps more important for him – by a powerful audience back home in China.

“This is largely a PR visit – something to show the leadership back in Beijing that he’s prepared for leadership, that he can handle the United States,” said Walter Lohman, director of Asian studies at the Heritage Foundation.

Xi will remain China’s vice president for 13 months, but in autumn will inherit the first top title from President Hu Jintao — that of head of the Chinese Communist Party — before being anointed state president of the rising Asian power in March 2013.

His formal U.S. host during his tour next Monday to Friday is Vice President Joe Biden, who visited China as Xi’s guest in August.

But Washington is sparing no protocol detail in hosting Xi, who will meet President Barack Obama at the White House, lunch with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and call on Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at the Pentagon.

Before Xi’s visit, U.S. officials and analysts talk less in terms of “deliverables,” or formal agreements, on vexing trade disputes and diplomatic spats over Iran and Syria. Instead, they talk of “investment” in ties with a man set to be in power long after Obama, whatever the result of the U.S. election in November.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is placing renewed priority on Asia as it winds down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but has no desire for new bases in the region, the head of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific said on Friday.

Admiral Robert Willard, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, said the military’s goal is to have a network of places close to the sea lanes of Southeast Asia where American forces can visit on rotation, avoiding the costly maintenance of bases.

“There is no desire nor view right now that the U.S. is seeking basing options anywhere in the Asia-Pacific theater,” he told reporters in Washington.

Willard spoke as U.S. and Philippine officials were wrapping up two days of strategic talks in Washington that prompted speculation that Washington aimed to reopen bases in the Philippines. The Pentagon flatly denied having new basing plans.

He said his Hawaii-based Pacific Command preferred a model along the lines of plans to set up a Marine training facility in northern Australia and to rotate warships through Singapore.

“As I look at where the forces are and where they need to be present day-to-day, we are biased in Northeast Asia, and when we look at Southeast Asia and South Asia, the pressure is on Pacific Command to deploy and sustain forces there day to day,” said Willard.

The Pacific Command has 50,000 U.S. forces stationed in Japan and 28,000 in South Korea.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – China’s broad crackdown on dissent that has seen activists get lengthy jail terms and human rights lawyers disappear stems from a mix of arrogance and insecurity in Beijing, the most recently exiled Chinese dissident said on Wednesday.

“Behind the pride and conceit of the Chinese government there’s a great sense of crisis and vulnerability,” said Yu Jie, one of China’s most prominent Christian dissidents, who ran afoul of Beijing for critical writing and for his close ties to writer Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate.

In his first public appearance after he arrived in the United States with his family last week, Yu described a near-death experience at the hands of police torturers, quoting one as saying “We’ll pound you to death to avenge this (Liu’s Nobel).”

Liu was convicted in 2009 on charges of inciting subversion and sentenced to 11 years in jail. His jailing and the secretive house arrest of his wife Liu Xia have become the focus of an international outcry over China’s punishment of dissent.

Picked up by state security officers in Beijing the day before Liu’s award ceremony in Oslo, Yu said he was taken to a secret location, beaten, stripped and kicked by plainclothes officials who threatened to post his naked pictures online.

Yu told a news conference that his captors burned his face with cigarettes, kicked and slapped him repeatedly. He was taken to the hospital for life-saving emergency treatment. When Yu tried to tell a doctor he’d been beaten, a security official threatened to “pull out all of the tubes from your body and let you die.”

“If the order comes from above, we can dig a pit to bury you alive in half an hour, and no one on earth would know,” Yu quoted one of his police interrogators as saying.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s decision to reorient the U.S. military’s focus to the Asia-Pacific region will not lead to a major naval buildup there, the top U.S. Navy officer said on Tuesday, adding that the United States already has a robust presence in the area.

Obama last week unveiled a new military strategy shifting attention to Asia over the next decade while downsizing the overall force, moves that will accommodate significant cuts in projected U.S. defense spending.

But the Pentagon has not yet revealed what that plan will mean concretely for the deployment of U.S. military forces and equipment to different regions of the world. More details are due in the coming weeks during the rollout of the annual U.S. federal budget proposal.

China’s military did not wait for details before issuing statements accusing the United States of trying to contain China.

Addressing a forum in Washington, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations, put forward a chart showing that the U.S. Navy has about 50 ships and submarines deployed today in the western Pacific, compared with about 30 in the Middle East.

Greenert said the Navy would review Obama’s strategy and “adjust accordingly.”

“But my first assessment is that we’re in good shape in the Navy where we stand in the western Pacific,” he told a forum hosted by the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Kim Jong-il was reviled by human rights groups for jailing or starving hundreds of thousands of North Koreans and foreign diplomats abhorred his proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear saber-rattling.

But in life and even in death, Kim, who reportedly died on Saturday at 69, was comedy gold to foreign satirists — among the few outsiders who will miss the late North Korean leader and his elevator shoes and bouffant hairstyle.

Kim and his eccentric state were a frequent butt of jokes by U.S. television comedians, while satirical website The Onion ran a story in which Kim’s son wondered privately whether he was crazy enough to run North Korea.

“The Globe reports that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il raises money by selling fake Viagra pills. What it is about this guy? None of his missiles seem to launch,” late-night host Jay Leno once quipped after a failed North Korean rocket test.

“While emphasizing that he was definitely completely insane and would likely become even more so as leader of North Korea, the younger Kim nevertheless wondered if he could ever be enough of a lunatic to truly replace the most unhinged dictator on the planet,” said The Onion of heir-apparent Kim Jong-eun.

The Onion got so much mileage out of North Korean antics and threats over the years that they marked his death with a sampler of greatest hits — with headlines like “North Korea detonates 40 years of GDP” and photos of Kim turning into a giant transformer robot.

He was also immortalized in the 2004 U.S. film “Team America: World Police” in which a foul-mouthed Kim dropped U.N. nuclear inspector Hans Blix through a trap door to a shark pit, and declared in politically incorrect accented English: “You are worthress Arec Barrwin.” (You are worthless, Alec Baldwin)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich suffered a big drop in support in Iowa with Ron Paul taking the lead weeks before a key caucus in the state, according to a Democratic polling firm.

The Public Policy Polling telephone survey of 597 likely Republican caucus voters in Iowa found Paul, a congressman from Texas, leading with 23 percent of the vote, followed by 20 percent for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and 14 percent for Gingrich.

“Newt Gingrich’s campaign is rapidly imploding and Gingrich has now seen a big drop in his Iowa standing two weeks in a row,” the polling firm, which is affiliated with the Democratic Party, said in a statement.

Gingrich’s share of the vote in the past two weeks has gone from 27 percent to 22 percent to 14 percent, in the latest poll, taken Dec 16-18, with a margin of error for the survey of plus or minus four points, it said.

Gingrich’s personal favorability numbers also fell during the past fortnight from plus 31 to plus 12 to a minus 1 now among Iowa voters polled ahead of the Iowa caucus on January 3, the polling firm said.

Among the other candidates in the race to oppose Democratic President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election bid, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry each received 10 percent of the votes, while 4 percent went for Jon Huntsman, and 2 percent for Gary Johnson, it said.

The libertarian-leaning Paul’s unusual rise to the top of a poll comes amid a strong campaign in Iowa, the pollsters said. But they said his popularity depended heavily on the youth vote and he trailed both Romney and Gingrich among older voters.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Few in the United States would recognize Charlene Barshefsky or remember what she did. Not so in China where the former Trade Representative says she is stopped in the streets by ordinary people and thanked.

Her gift to the Chinese people was leading the U.S. delegation that negotiated China’s entry to the World Trade Organization in December 2001. The removal of trade barriers heralded unprecedented economic growth for China, vaulting it in a decade to the second largest economy in the world and helping slash its rural poverty rate from 10.2 percent in 2000 to 2.8 percent in 2010.

“The Chinese consider WTO entry the most historic achievement in U.S.-China relations since (U.S. President Richard) Nixon’s visit to China,” in 1972, Barshefsky said.

It is a different story in the United States where, 10 years on, China’s entry into the club of world trading nations is having equally huge ramifications.

The flood of cheap manufactured goods gives an extra $600 a year for the average American family to spend on clothing, shoes, household goods and electronics. But Made in China has hastened the decline of U.S. manufacturing. Factory jobs have shrunk in number by 25 percent the past decade to 11.5 million today, and average factory wages adjusted for inflation have virtually stagnated.

Chinese imports meanwhile have ballooned the U.S.-Sino trade deficit to $273 billion, four times that with any other country. It has stirred anti-China sentiment, a labor union backlash and legislation in Congress to try and force China to let its currency strengthen more rapidly to lower its export advantage.

Now American business, lured a decade ago by the promise of a fast-growing Chinese middle class, is starting to shift gears and rethink what the China dream can deliver. Some chief executives are questioning whether the United States is pressing China hard enough to hold up its side of the bargain in joining the elite trade club.

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) – Few in the United States would recognize Charlene Barshefsky or remember what she did. Not so in China where the former U.S. Trade Representative says she is stopped in the streets by ordinary people and thanked.

Her gift to the Chinese people was leading the U.S. delegation that negotiated China’s entry to the World Trade Organization in December 2001. The removal of trade barriers heralded unprecedented economic growth for China, vaulting it in a decade to the second largest economy in the world and helping slash its rural poverty rate from 10.2 percent in 2000 to 2.8 percent in 2010.

“The Chinese consider WTO entry the most historic achievement in U.S.-China relations since (U.S. President Richard) Nixon’s visit to China,” in 1972, Barshefsky said.

It is a different story in the United States where, 10 years on, China’s entry into the club of world trading nations is having equally huge ramifications.

The flood of cheap manufactured goods gives an extra $600 a year for the average American family to spend on clothing, shoes, household goods and electronics. But Made in China has hastened the decline of U.S. manufacturing. Factory jobs have shrunk in number by 25 percent the past decade to 11.5 million today, and average factory wages adjusted for inflation have virtually stagnated.

Chinese imports meanwhile have ballooned the U.S.-Sino trade deficit to $273 billion, four times that with any other country. It has stirred anti-China sentiment, a labor union backlash and legislation in Congress to try and force China to let its currency strengthen more rapidly to lower its export advantage.

Now American business, lured a decade ago by the promise of a fast-growing Chinese middle class, is starting to shift gears and rethink what the China dream can deliver. Some chief executives are questioning whether the United States is pressing China hard enough to hold up its side of the bargain in joining the elite trade club.

BANGKOK (Reuters) – Floodwater in parts of Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, is receding after weeks of inundation but Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and water experts said residents in some western districts could still be suffering into next year.

However, Yingluck reassured investors at a news conference with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday that Thailand would get back on track quickly and had a long-term strategy for redesigning its water management system.

“We’ll recover soon,” Yingluck said, adding that restoring some infrastructure could be completed within 45-90 days.

She said eastern Bangkok, where two industrial estates are still surrounded by water, should be flood-free by the end of the year but draining water from western districts was harder.

Thailand’s worst flooding in at least five decades has claimed 564 lives since July, with water flowing slowly down from the north, inundating agricultural and industrial areas in the center before swamping parts of Bangkok from late October.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, also on a visit to Thailand, offered $10 million in aid, in addition to $1.1 million already offered, for humanitarian assistance, equipment and training in emergency response and disaster prevention.

“While we are focused now on the immediate needs of the Thai people, we will also be here for the long run,” Clinton told a news conference.

MANILA (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday urged claimants to the South China Sea not to resort to intimidation to push their cause in the potentially oil-rich waters, an indirect reference to China ahead of a regional leaders’ summit.

Clinton reiterated that the United States wanted a candid discussion of the maritime dispute, which an Australian think tank warned earlier this year could lead to war, when the leaders gather in Bali, Indonesia, this week.

However, China says it does not want the issue discussed, putting it at loggerheads with the United States once again after they exchanged barbs over trade and currency at last week’s meeting of Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum in Hawaii.

“The United States does not take a position on any territorial claim, because any nation with a claim has a right to assert it,” Clinton said in Manila, while marking the 60th anniversary of the U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defence Treaty.

“But they do not have a right to pursue it through intimidation or coercion. They should be following international law, the rule of law, the U.N. Convention on Law of the Sea.”

She said disputes in the sea lanes should be resolved through the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which defined rules on how countries can use the world’s oceans and their resources.

That could embolden Southeast Asia’s hand against China, which has said it would not submit to international arbitration over competing claims to the area, believed to be rich in natural resources and a major shipping lane.