BY TOM PLATE

America's love-hate relationship with China proceeds apace. The latest bump in the bilateral road is yet another fearsome China scare.

Actually, though, in America, this is nothing new.

Recall that an almost perfect storm swirled around the 1997 book, "The Coming Conflict With China." Whipped up by two American journalists, the polemic was anything but optimistic about the Sino-U.S. relationship, bulking up China's military buildup and melo-dramatizing the truth that China's strategic aims in Asia do not, of course, perfectly mirror those of the United States.

Two years later, a different scare came from the Cox Commission Report, alleging widespread Beijing spying in America. But that fizzled after the U.S. media exhausted itself in its hysteria -- and when the U.S. government's case against alleged spy Wen Ho Lee fell apart.

This time, the scare issue is China's economic development, which now, it seems, is a major economic menace. Instead of being, on balance, an overall blessing for all concerned, China's rapid growth is being pitched as a rapacious force undermining other Asian economies and eating away at America's as well.

The political pitchmen come from within U.S. lobbies fearful of competing with lower-priced Chinese imports. President Bush "continues to facilitate the transfer of money, industrial capacity and technology to China in ways that will aid its development as a threat to the United States and its Asian allies," charges William R. Hawkins, a protectionist pundit for the U.S. Business and Industry Council. "The Bush administration must choose between the need to protect American security from a rising China and its desire to please corporate supporters who are helping China rise."

Then there's the argument that China's gain is basically everyone else's loss. An increasingly globalized and modernized nation of 1.3 billion is not a win-win for almost everyone; it's a losing proposition for everyone but China.

That's absurd. Just as the Japanese economic miracle of the '80s roiled economies in America, China's economic progress will produce some tense moments, as China's neighbors in Asia become understandably more worried about competing. But on the whole, Asia and the rest of the world were far more enriched by Japan's success than undermined; and that will be the case, too, as China rises economically.

All countries have domestic lobbies trying to bar the way of foreign economic competition. Just look at the extraordinary worldwide row over the Bush administration's decision to cave in to the U.S. steel industry and unions by slapping regressive import quotas on foreign steel. That decision has our strategic and economic allies in Asia, such as South Korea, and in Europe, such as Great Britain, angrier at the United States than at anything China has done lately.

Who is the greater threat -- China or the United States -- to world economic equanimity? There's no way to answer that, of course, and it's really a silly question. Let's just say that what's continually needed in America's relationship with China is not another over-hyped Red Scare, but the three ingredients all too often missing: common sense, political maturity and intellectual honesty.

Plate is professor of policy and communication studies and founder of the Asia Pacific Media Network. He is a syndicated columnist with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International and Knight-Ridder.