Recently, political pronouncements and editorial columns on China seem intent on demonizing the country as either an economic threat or a nascent Nazi regime. Both images are far from reality, according to PNS commentator Franz Schurmann. A professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was former head of the Center for Chinese Studies, Schurmann is the author of The Organization and Ideology of Communist China and co-editor of The China Reader, among other books, and a founding editor of Pacific News Service. He recently returned from his third extensive trip through China.

In the United States today, there seem to be only two significant public images of China. One portrays it as a growing giant that Americans must trade with but also be wary of. The other sees it as a monster that looks more and more like Nazi Germany. Long gone are the noble, poor China of Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth," and the China of age-old wisdom celebrated by Lin Yutang.

What is China really like?

Certainly it is growing -- economic growth has been 10 percent annually for some years now and is expected to continue. Travelers in China's traditionally poor inland regions see it everywhere, and recent UNDP figures show half of China's poor people have been pulled up above the poverty line over the last 20 years. And China, with 1.2 billion plus people, must be accounted a giant.

Is it becoming a reincarnation of Nazi Germany? Basic trends can often be predicted with some accuracy, but not what depends on political whim, like the decision of one powerful ruler. There is no rational way to argue that the Holocaust was historically determined and therefore inevitable. And though it may deeply offend social scientists, historians have accumulated convincing evidence that single rulers, even those who rule over immense countries, can determine big chunks of experienced history through their decisions or even their moods.

Few observers, if any -- and just about any foreigner can now enter China and travel pretty freely -- have reported signs of planned, mammoth human rights violations such as immense labor camps with facilities for killing "inferior peoples." Instead, travelers generally report a huge population hard at work creating market value and making money.

Can one single observer, even one equipped with bits of knowledge and some command of the language, offer any credible judgment on China?

Being an historian helps. Like futurists, historians look at flows over large time periods -- but like humanists they are always aware of the unpredictable, the sudden unexpected event or move that changes everything. Historians know, but cannot systematize, that certainty and chance are bound up with each other, like two boxers within the same ring.

When Richard Nixon was secretly contriving his China breakthrough he explained to intimate aides that the Chinese word for the English "crisis" was a compound including two elements signifying "danger" and "opportunity." For Nixon the danger was Vietnam and the opportunity China.

Beginning in late 1989, some U.S. strategists suddenly saw a great opportunity vis-a-vis China. The Chinese political class had begun to split. One major leader, Hu Yaobang, had died, precipitating the massive demonstrations that led to the Tiananmen massacre; another, Zhao Ziyang, who spearheaded China's opening to the outside world, was purged. Popular unrest over corruption and suppression of political change spread all over the country. There were widespread reports of disintegration within the military

Over the next two years protests, often openly imitating Tiananmen, spread throughout Eastern Europe. When the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, these U.S. strategists, foresaw a similar fate for China's aging leadership. They grew giddy with the thought that both of America's greatest communist foes could be defeated without waging a single battle. Perhaps they knew that Sun-tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war, had proclaimed that the greatest general of all was he who won a war without having waged a single battle.

Instead China pulled itself up from the floor to score one of the greatest comebacks in history. The reasons why are pretty clear.

First, the country's leaders pulled together to rescue a faltering government. A successful rescue operation during the huge Central China floods of the summer of 1991 restored the people's confidence in that government.

Second, the Chinese people, both in China and abroad, responded with what must be the greatest grassroots economic buildup ever seen in so short a time. As a result, China has become the industrial powerhouse of the world. This buildup has made U.S. economic strategists realize how dependent America's own economy has become on China, and it has made military strategists realize that America's security interests are best served by cooperating with China rather than seeking its defeat.

There is now no country in the world that does not seek to benefit from China's economic growth and political stability -- ironically, none so avidly as Taiwan, even as it angers Beijing by asserting its independence. Yet many Taiwan people see the People's Republic of China as a threat to their way of life. There is a China threat but it is not what the China threat advocates keep drumming in.

Critics of China might be more believable if they dropped the Nazi Germany insinuations. There is no evidence -- and much to the contrary -- that the Chinese leadership has political designs against other countries in the region. Even its assertions of sovereignty over the oil-rich Spratley islands suggest China wants to use them as diplomatic "cards" in exchange for other advantages. Its big aims for new oil supplies are in its own western regions, Central Asia and even Iraq.

In the disastrous 1960s just about every country bordering China was an enemy. Now every one of those countries is a friend or at least a good neighbor. History suggests indeterminate acts of chance are greatest when opportunity or crisis beckons. So far as China's neighbors are concerned -- including ex-neighbor Hong Kong and quasi-neighbor Taiwan -- relations are so good that Beijing will likely do nothing to upset the apple cart, for better or for worse.

It is possible that the threat argument, while it appears far-fetched so far as China's political class is concerned, might have some force in terms of China's basics -- its demography, economics, technology, culture and society.

China's population is stabilizing, but it is expected to go to 1.6 billion by 2030 and the Chinese are also moving very fast up the ladders of learning.

As for the economy, China's miracles are being underestimated, if anything. This is not just a matter of high growth rates but involves the Chinese gift for innovation. Creativity requires freedom, and those who decry the absence of democracy in China should look more closely at China's rural areas where new village-level democratic experiments are making progress. Many people, including young dissidents, believe the possibilities for democracy in China in the long run are good.

Nor should one underestimate China's social power. One child per family has become the rule -- even in some rural areas -- not because of forced abortions but entirely as a result of the social liberation of women which, as elsewhere in the world, has brought about a dramatic drop in fertility. When gender equality replaces servitude and hierarchy in China, it will send a new shock wave of creativity around the world similar to the wave that grew out of freedom and equality in the U.S.

Lastly there is the question of culture. Chinese culture today is treading water. A lot of tradition remains but much has been cast aside. American culture is everywhere evident, and religion is reappearing, arousing fears within the political class, but the cultural situation is reminiscent of America a century ago when older Anglo-Saxon cultures mixed with powerful new immigrant influences. Culturally America was a confused and discordant mess.

But then came World War II, and American culture turned into a global civilization which has now transformed the world.

In this area, there is a China threat -- but it is not the one entertained by the China-bashers. It is that at some time in the next century Chinese civilization will become a serious competitor with American civilization. If both see this as a contest, then only one can win.

Deep down it seems to this historian that a lot of China-bashers fear America will not win in the clash of civilizations -- a war in which not a single fatal shot will have been fired.