Washington has repeatedly asked for permission to open an FBI office, but China only agreed in February, when President Bush met with Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Beijing.

The one-person FBI office is to be staffed by Tony Lau, a 20-year Chinese-American veteran of the bureau. According to the agency's Web site, it has more than 40 such offices worldwide.

"We think that this will help the two sides carry out law enforcement and judicial cooperation on the principle of mutual benefits," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.

Lau's job will be to promote cooperation aimed at "curtailing organized and transnational crime ... and in the major endeavor of counterterrorism," Ashcroft said. "That is our highest priority."

Ashcroft is in the middle of a weeklong trip to Asia to discuss law enforcement efforts in the war on terrorism.

Earlier in the week, he met with Japanese Foreign Minster Yoriko Kawaguchi in Tokyo. He planned to visit Hong Kong before returning to the United States on Friday.

Ashcroft said that in Beijing he had met with Luo Gan, the Communist Party's senior law-enforcement official, and Justice Minister Zhang Fusen.

He said he was pleased that they and other Chinese officials "uniformly indicate that wherever, whenever, however terrorism can be disrupted, (it) needs to be disrupted."

Liu said the meetings were "an important part of the international campaign against terrorism and part and parcel of the constructive and cooperative relations" between China and the United States.

China has accused the East Turkestan Islamic Movement -- a small group seeking independence for the Muslim Chinese northwest -- of being part of an international Islamic terrorist conspiracy.

Beijing says the group got weapons and training from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, though it has not provided evidence to support its claims.

The U.S. government had initially rejected the Chinese claims, but in August added the group to its own list of terrorist organizations.

That step came the day after China released rules on missile exports that had long been sought by Washington. The timing prompted some observers to say the Bush administration was motivated by politics rather than solid evidence against the group.

Ashcroft rejected those suggestions, insisting Thursday that the decision to put any group on the list was "based not on political negotiations ... (but) on the availability of evidence that supports the designation."

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-china-us-ashcroft1024oct24,0,3503552.story