All of a sudden Washington and Beijing are back on track, after a series of reversals brought their relations to the breaking point. Much deeper forces are now at work binding the two together in the Pacific. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, author of several books on China, is professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

If Harry Wu's arrest brought the U.S. and China close to their first breakup in over two decades, his release signals the start of a new and even tighter embrace.

* Hillary Rodham Clinton originally planned just a stop-over visit in Beijing on an East Asian tour -- now Beijing is her sole destination.

* Beijing is also the destination of former president George Bush who will be attending an upcoming conference on food.

* In October President Clinton will meet with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

* That same month Chinese premier Li Peng will visit America's close neighbor Canada.

Why is China suddenly so important to America and America so important to China? Part of the answer lies in the word "food."

The biggest long-term policy challenge facing the current Chinese leadership is how to feed its immense population which, some experts predict, will face mass starvation by the year 2030. Despite tremendous gains in agricultural productivity since 1979 China's capacity to feed itself won't keep pace with its population growth -- projected to reach 1.6 billion by 2030.

Only two countries in the world will have food supplies sufficient to cover China's anticipated food deficit -- the U.S. and Canada.

A second factor binding the U.S. and China together is trade. Five years after unleashing its agricultural reforms in 1979, China embarked on a stunning industrialization campaign which is now eating up prime farmland. Its main aim is to increase China's wealth by supplying a myriad of quality material goods at cheap prices to eager-to-buy customers in the U.S., Japan and Western Europe.

The results are obvious in the shopping malls, department stores and restaurants of New York, Paris, Tokyo and Singapore which are overflowing with products from the vast new industrial heartland that now stretches 1000 miles up the Yangtze River valley from Shanghai. By early next century, this region's manufacturing will dominate the world. And Shanghai will likely surpass Tokyo as the world's premier financial and commercial center.

The trade figures are already mind-boggling. In 1979 China's total foreign trade was less than that of Portugal, Western Europe's poorest country. In the first six months of this year China's total trade already amounted to $126 billion -- almost a 30 percent increase over the same period of 1994. Of this almost 70 percent were exports, which jumped 44 percent over last year (in contrast to imports which increased by only 15 percent). With such positive trade balances likely to continue, China's trade surplus could some day be even greater than Japan's.

Today the U.S. ranks just behind Japan and ahead of Western Europe, Hong Kong and Taiwan as China's chief trading partner. Wherever life is easy and pleasant, the dependency on this new industrial behemoth is turning into an addiction.

A third factor pulling the U.S. and China closer together is the deepening realization that their destinies are now intertwined, much like those of the U.S. and Japan, in the coming Pacific Century. In fact, 50 years after the end of the Pacific War, the three great countries that fought in that war -- the U.S., Japan and China -- are locked in a three sided competitive-collaborative embrace from which they cannot free themselves without dragging all three into an abyss.

The scare scenarios now circulating about the ramifications of an impending Soviet-style China collapse fail to reflect how tight this three-sided embrace has become. Should China again decompose into civil war after its aged leader Deng Xiaoping dies, tens, even hundreds of millions of Chinese will starve. But Japan, which has been shifting investment away from the U.S. to China and Southeast Asia, could itself face economic collapse, with an economic domino effect rapidly spreading to the U.S. and Western Europe.

Less commonly noted are the positive ways in which the three mighty countries of the Pacific now need each other. China, for example, has the world's biggest light industry, Japan the biggest heavy industry and America leads in high-tech. America and Japan are the world's premier financial powers and China will soon join them. And if China can increase its food capacity even further, America and Canada can cover the remaining deficit.

What has become evident from the broader context surrounding the Harry Wu saga is that even as the U.S. may be close to armed intervention in European Bosnia, its future is now locked into the Asia-Pacific region. This reality is reflected in the Clinton administration's response to the recent Japanese turn-around towards active support of the ailing dollar. It appears to have decided to end its Japan-bashing, good for electioneering at home but bad for global economic stability.

And the White House, side-stepping the many different China lobbies now emerging in Washington, has evidently decided to return to the relationship-building course first laid out by Nixon and Kissinger with their dramatic breakthrough to China in July 1971.