WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (AFP) - US-China relations are developing "rather smoothly" ahead of President George W. Bush's visit to Beijing this month, despite a year of turbulence, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday.

"The relationship is back on an improving track," Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, attributing progress to a desire by both sides to move on from a crisis over a US EP-3 spyplane downed in China last year.

Powell stressed that despite their ideological differences, the United States and China should cooperate in areas where they had common interests, including Beijing's entry into the World Trade Organisation, peace efforts on the Korean peninsula and battling HIV/AIDS.

"On such issues we can talk, and produce constructive outcomes," Powell said, laying out the case for engagement with China, a school of diplomacy favored by one of several competing camps in the Bush administration.

But Powell acknowledged there were areas in which the US and China "decidedly did not see eye to eye" for example on Taiwan, missile proliferation and religious freedom.

Another one of those issues, human rights, was brought up by veteran anti-Beijing Senator Jesse Helms, who condemned the jailing of Hong Kong businessman Li Guangqiang who tried to smuggle 16,000 bibles into the China.

"We find it a deplorable sentence and a deplorable charge," Powell said, adding that Bush was likely to raise the issue during his visit to Beijing.

"On such issues we can have a dialogue and try to make progress. But we do not want the issues where we differ to restrain us from pursuing those where we share common goals," Powell said.

"That is the basis on which our relations are going rather smoothly at present."

Powell's remarks will be read as an attempt to vindicate his department's approach to Beijing, which has sought to prevent individual confrontations from infecting the relationship as a whole.

That approach differs from a more robust rhetoric often emanating from Pentagon, where China is seen as a looming security threat.

As the clock ticks down to the US-China summit in Beijing later this month, Chinese vice foreign minister Li Zhaoxing has met top US officials in Washington to make final preparations.

Li met Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage on Tuesday, and Vice President Dick Cheney dropped by his meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on Monday, officials said.

Powell and his diplomats are credited by many observers for crafting a face-saving way out of the spyplane crisis, with language which expressed US sorrow for the death of a Chinese fighter pilot in the incident, but fell short of an apology.

Since terror attacks on September 11 fundamentally altered much of its foreign policy, the United States has praised China for its intelligence assistance during its campaign against terrorism.

But it has also warned Beijing that it should not intensify its campaign against Uighur separatists in western Xinjiang province, using the excuse that it is battling terrorism within its borders.

Powell also argued Tuesday that Beijing had played a constructive role in his initiative to downplay tensions between India and Pakistan.

"Beijing was not trying to be a spoiler but instead was trying to help us alleviate tensions and convince the two parties to scale down their dangerous confrontation -- which now it appears they are beginning to do."

"All of this cooperation came as a result of our careful efforts to build the relationship over the months since the EP-3 incident."

Bush will visit Beijing for a day-and-a-half arriving on February 21, 30 years to the day since then president Richard Nixon and Chinese leader Chairman Mao Zedong held epochal talks which led to China's emergence on the world stage.

He is due to meet Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji, on a tour of Asia which also includes stops in Seoul and Tokyo.

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