All discussions between states -- diplomatic or belligerent, frank or misleading -- must rely on the exchange of words. And while a rose might smell as sweet by any other name, the history of concepts like democracy and rights, as expressed in language, can lead to unnecessary misunderstanding. PNS commentator Elvin Geng, a graduate of University of California Berkeley in East Asian studies, now lives in New York City.

The live broadcast of a discussion between Presidents Clinton and Jiang Zemin signals the fact that dialogue between the two countries is at high tide.

But in the "frank discussions" that began when Jiang visited the United States and continued in Beijing, profound differences of opinion still center on words -- words like "democracy," "human rights," and "freedom."

For example, when Jiang said in Washington last November that the idea of democracy originated 2000 years ago with Chinese philosophers, he was greeted with ridicule. "Fully improbable," wrote Seth Faison, Beijing correspondent of the New York Times. The comment "revealed an enormous gulf between two different perceptions of human rights."

The "gulf" is in fact a matter of history.

Chinese is an ideographic language. It uses characters -- symbols -- that represent an idea or object rather than a word as the units of the language. Each character denotes a meaning as well as a sound.

When Western ideas began to come into China in the 19th century, the foreign term for those ideas came into Chinese either by echoing the sound of the word or by translating the word or words into Chinese.

For example, "communism" became "kanmennisimu." The phonetic elements involve kan (health), men (door), ni (Buddhist nun), si (gentle) and mu (mother). This hodgepodge was quickly discarded for a translation "gongchan zhuyi."

But translation presents complications of its own, because the characters already exist in classical Chinese, and the old meaning persists alongside the new, translated one.

As a result, new words in modern Chinese carry two distinct historical meanings and, to some extent, a hybrid meaning.

Take Jiang's use of "democracy" as an example. The word "minzhu" first appeared in a classic work called "Shuji" where it referred to a benevolent "ruler of the people," that is, a leader whose legitimacy rests on the people's welfare. Those who ruled by force and oppression, in contrast, were not given this title.

In the late 19th century, "minzhu" was the word used to translate "democracy" -- in Chinese, the one term can mean "rule of the people" as well as "ruler of the people."

Both uses of minzhu share the sense that the government ought to operate to meet the needs of the people. This criterion may be fulfilled by an enlightened dictator or a Leninist regime as well as by a U.S.-style constitutional democracy. Still, it is not difficult to see why Jiang Zemin suggested that ancient Chinese philosophers were the first to advocate "democracy."

In the Beijing news conference, Jiang Zemin again drew on China's classics when he spoke on rights and freedom. "More than two thousand years ago, a great thinker of China's Han dynasty once said, 'Of all the living things nurtured between heaven and earth, the most valuable is human beings'," he said.

"So the Chinese nation always respects and maintains the dignity and the rights of the people. Today the Chinese government solemnly commits itself to the promotion and protection of human rights and freedoms."

The link between Chinese philosophical tenets and "rights" or "quan" provides another illustration of the use of a new word. "Quan" takes its meaning from both a translated concept and a traditional understanding.

Interestingly, "quan" also means power, and contributes to both the Chinese words for "human rights" and for "state power." Professor Andrew Nathan of Columbia has written that this double meaning allowed early 20th century reformers in China to see rights as a kind of substance that could be added up to become the powers of the state.

This assumption is rooted in the Confucian ideal, which sees a natural harmony in social roles. The Confucian ideal may be long gone, but the word still illustrates the fact that the Chinese do not assume an adversarial relationship between the state and individual -- a notion so prominent in the Western understanding of rights.

None of this means that political differences with China are simply the effect of linguistic misunderstandings. But a sense of the slippage between languages could shed light on a culture and government America often finds unintelligible.

Jiang Zemin has frequently repeated his refrain that human rights are concepts that must be seen in the context of our different histories and cultures. He may be right, but that does not remove the possibility of criticism. Rather, to recognize the different meanings of terms like human rights or democracy is to say that dissident opinions from individuals, as well as from nations, should be heard.