Chinese vice president to visit Pentagon

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao will become the highest ranking Chinese official to visit the Pentagon when he holds a scheduled half-hour meeting Wednesday with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a staunch critic of China's military buildup.

Hu comes to the Pentagon after a year of tense relations with the U.S. military, sparked by last year's incident in which the Chinese held a US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane for several days.

The visit comes shortly before the Pentagon plans to submit an annual report to Congress assessing Chinese military power. The report will provide an unclassified intelligence assessment of China's ongoing military buildup and modernization of its forces.

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The report is expected to be critical in particular of China's buildup of short-range ballistic missiles along its coastline opposite Taiwan. One estimate is there are now 300 missiles at that location.

In the past year, Rumsfeld has overhauled the U.S.-Chinese military-to-military contacts program. Rather than establish a yearly schedule of visits, as was done in the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld has continued to hold to a policy of case-by-case review of each potential visit.

The Pentagon has claimed that Chinese visits to the United States were more fruitful for them than when U.S. officials visited China and were repeatedly shown the same military facilities.

In the past year, there have been no naval ships visits by China to the United States, or by the U.S. Navy to mainland China, though there have been ship visits to Hong Kong. In addition, there have been no joint military exercises.

However, there have been relatively low level academic exchanges, conferences and meetings between military officials.