Clinton Begins Asia Trip, Trying to Ease Tension With China - New York Times

RAROTONGA, Cook Islands â€" Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton began a 10-day, 6-nation visit to Asia pledging to broaden American diplomatic, economic and security support in the Pacific, but also offering conciliatory remarks toward China at a time when tensions are rising over territorial disputes.

“We all have important contributions and stakes in this region’s success â€" to advance your security, your opportunity and your prosperity,” she told leaders on Friday at the Pacific Island Forum, an annual conference of 16 nations and self-governing states located across a vast stretch of ocean. “I think, after all, the Pacific is big enough for all of us.”

Mrs. Clinton’s visit, the first by a secretary of state to the forum and to the remote Cook Islands, nevertheless highlighted an intensifying race between China and the United States for influence in a part of the world that President Obama has tried to make a greater focus of American foreign policy.

Mrs. Clinton, accompanied at the forum by the head of the Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, pledged new assistance programs to boost economic development in the region and to remove unexploded ordnance on land and at sea that are still posing a threat 70 years after some of the bloodiest battles of World War II. The United States, she noted, spends $330 million a year on development projects in the Pacific.

She and Admiral Locklear also pledged to expand American Navy and Coast Guard patrols with local law enforcement agencies aboard ships and aircraft to combat illegal fishing, trafficking and other security challenges.

The competition for influence comes as China has been increasingly assertive about its claims on broad areas of the South China Sea and in other waters, increasing tensions with countries like the Philippines and Japan that declare ownership of disputed islands.

The United States has backed the smaller nations’ assertions that talks over disputes should be multilateral, rather than bilateral negotiations that could give China the advantage. The administration is also working to beef up the American military presence in the region.

Mrs. Clinton acknowledged, without explicitly mentioning China, that others view the renewed American commitment in Asia as a challenge to their own economic and security interests.

In recent months, American criticism of China’s trade and development policies â€" often with authoritarian governments the United States has sought to isolate, like Fiji in the Pacific â€" have prompted sharp rebukes from Chinese officials. She reiterated her calls for China to invest in more beneficial ways.

“Now here in the Pacific, we want to see China act in a fair and transparent way,” she said during a news conference with Prime Minister John Key of New Zealand, which administers security for the Cook Islands, a far-flung, sparsely populated archipelago of 15 islands. “We want to see them contribute to sustainable development for the people of the Pacific; to protect the precious environment, including the ocean; and to pursue economic activity that will benefit the people.”

Mrs. Clinton will visit Beijing later this week, her second trip there this year, as well as Indonesia, Brunei, East Timor and Russia for the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting, where she will represent the United States in place of a campaigning Mr. Obama.