The disclosure of the military aspects of the underground rail system followed completion and opening of a new subway line in the Chinese capital Dec. 30, along with the extension of several other lines. The subway upgrade is part of an effort to ease gridlocked traffic in the city of 20 million people.

According to Chinese civil defense officials quoted Dec. 5 in the Global Times, a newspaper published by the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, the subway can “withstand a nuclear or poison gas attack.”

A U.S. official said the disclosure of the subway’s capabilities to withstand attack is unusual since it highlights Beijing’s strategic nuclear modernization program, something normally kept secret from state-controlled media. The strategic nuclear buildup includes the expansion of offensive nuclear forces, missile defenses, and anti-satellite arms.

China is building new long-range mobile missiles, including the DF-41, and plans to deploy up to eight new ballistic missile submarines. Reports from Asia indicate the Chinese military is also planning to build new long-range strategic nuclear bombers.

Russia too is expanding its nuclear forces with new submarines and missiles. Moscow announced last year that it is also constructing some 5,000 underground bomb shelters in Russia’s capital in anticipation of a possible future nuclear conflict.

By contrast, the U.S. government has done little to bolster civil defense measures, preferring the largely outdated concept of mutual assured destruction that leaves populations vulnerable to attack and building only limited missile defenses that the Obama administration has said are not designed to counter Chinese or Russian nuclear strikes.

The Obama administration instead is seeking deep cuts in U.S. nuclear forces as part of President Barack Obama’s policy of seeking the elimination of all nuclear arms.

According to the Global Times report, the new subway lines were “designed to be used in the event of an emergency, for underground evacuation from one station to another, emergency shelter, and storage for emergency supplies.”

A military engineer identified only as Hu and as part of the Chinese military’s Second Artillery Corps, which builds and deploys China’s nuclear arsenal, helped design the civil defense aspects of the subway.

Special steel-reinforced gates installed on all subway tunnels and used to separate stations are one key feature of the reinforced subway. Hu said it is designed to protect people who seek shelter during a heavy storm, toxic gas attack, or a nuclear strike.

“The station has three hours of breathable air after the gates are closed, isolating the station from the outside world,” Hu was quoted as saying.

“Although each gate weighs around 7 tons, it takes just three minutes for two adults to open or close it manually,” she said.

The new blast gates were introduced into subway construction projects in 2007.

A second Chinese official, identified in the report as Liang, said each subway also has an air filtration system in case of a chemical weapons gas attack. The system is designed to keep air flowing into the station.

“People can actually shelter in the subway for more than three hours because of this system,” Liang said.

Above-ground subway exits also can be sealed during an attack, Liang said, using heavy blast doors concealed behind temporary walls.

Additional civil defense barriers and doors are being installed in the Beijing subway later, according to Cao Yanping, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Civil Air-Raid Shelter.

Jiang Hao, a Chinese military engineer from the 4th Engineer Design & Research Institute of General Staff Department, told the newspaper that blast gates already are in use in cities such as Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province, and Shenyang, in Liaoning Province.

“The new facilities also have other defensive capabilities like emergency communication equipment at each station, which makes effective communication possible during a conflict,” Jiang Hao, the engineer, told reporters in Beijing.

China’s network of underground tunnels for nuclear weapons and missiles was disclosed only recently, and highlighted in Georgetown University’s Asian Arms Control Project, dubbed it China’s Underground Great Wall.

The Pentagon first disclosed the nuclear tunnel complex stretching an estimated 3,000 miles in its annual report to Congress on the Chinese military in 2011.

“China’s strategic missile force, the Second Artillery Corps (SAC), has developed and utilized [underground facilities] since deploying its oldest liquid-fueled missile systems and continues to utilize them to protect and conceal their newest and most modern solid-fueled mobile missiles,” the report stated.

The facilities are used for storing and hiding missiles and nuclear warheads, and for command bunkers hardened against nuclear attacks.

China has been tunneling and hiding its nuclear forces since the early 1950s but the first public disclosure of the effort came in 2010 during the anniversary of the Second Artillery Corps.

Until then, both Beijing and the Pentagon kept most details of Chinese underground nuclear facilities and arms secret.

The scholars and protesters were acting in support of the Southern Weekly in its confrontation with a top censor after the publication was forced to change a New Year’s editorial calling for political reform into a tribute praising the ruling Communist Party. Rumors circulated that at least one of the newspaper’s news departments was going on strike, but they could not be immediately confirmed.

Protesters, including middle school students and white-collar workers, gathered outside the offices of the newspaper in the southern city of Guangzhou to lay flowers at the gate, hold signs and shout slogans calling for freedom of speech, political reform, constitutional governance and democracy. […]

The protest came as 18 Chinese academics signed an open letter calling for the dismissal of Tuo Zhen, a provincial propaganda minister blamed for the censorship. The scholars included legal professors, liberal economists, historians and writers.

The protest comes after the government shut down the online political magazine, Yanhuang Chunqiu (or China Through the Ages), because it posted an article on constitutional rights and political reform.

Wang has been charged with “defection” and abuse of authority. The Chinese term for the crime of defection is a combination of treason and flight.

Plans to file the treason charges were first reported by the Free Beacon Aug. 16.

China’s government appears to have timed the trial to coincide with the visit to Beijing by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Observers say the timing suggests Chinese officials are sending a political signal to other potential defectors who, like Wang, might seek to cooperate with the United States, a country portrayed daily in state-controlled media as China’s main enemy.

Wang set off China’s biggest political scandal in decades on Feb. 6 when he sought refuge at the U.S. Consulate Chengdu, in southern China, after fleeing the neighboring city of Chongqing and his former boss, Communist Party regional chief Bo Xilai.

After 33 hours inside the consulate, Wang was turned over to China’s Ministry of State Security and disappeared from public view.

Chinese officials revealed after the attempted defection that armored personnel carriers had been sent from Chongqing to Chengdu as part of a plan by Bo to use force against the consulate if needed to prevent Wang from defecting.

Inside the consulate, Wang provided documents to U.S. officials and also revealed that Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai were behind the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, who was found dead in a Chongqing hotel last November. In a high-profile political case, Gu and an associated were convicted of the murder. Four other Chongqing police officials were also convicted of covering up the crime.

The Wang trial is viewed as the final step prior to the Communist Party’s potentially most unsettling move—the possible arrest and imprisonment of Bo Xilai, who until Wang’s attempted defection had been slated for promotion to the Politburo Standing Committee, the nine-member collective dictatorship that rules China.

U.S. officials have said Wang sought political asylum while at the embassy but his appeal was rejected by senior Obama administration officials, including officials within the office of Vice President Joe Biden, who were concerned that granting the defector’s request would upset relations with China, including the impending visit to the United States by Xi Jinping, China’s next supreme leader.

White House officials later denied that Biden or his office influenced the U.S. decision or that President Obama took part in deciding the defector’s fate. The president was informed of the defection, they said.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, initially asked for an investigation into the apparent mishandling of the defection and asked to see all State Department cables and email on the incident.

Ros-Lehtinen, however, later declined to comment on the outcome any briefings on the case or committee activities related to the affairs.

Wang was initially to be tried at an open judicial proceeding in Chengdu but authorities closed the hearing claiming the case involved state secrets, Associated Press reported from Chengdu.

“It was closed according to Chinese law because it involves state secrets,” Wang’s defense lawyer Wang Yuncai told the news service.

The public hearing for the trial is set for Tuesday and large numbers of news reporters have traveled to Chengdu to observe the proceedings. Chinese authorities initially said tickets for seating at the hearing would be available but later said that none were available for the general public.

In the past, such charges against a former official almost certainly would result in a death penalty.

However, Wang, because of his role in identifying the murder of Heywood by Bo’s wife, is now expected to receive a lengthy prison term instead.

A former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials, Kenneth deGraffenreid, has said the administration’s mishandling of the Wang defection is “a major intelligence and policy failure—the loss of a potentially valuable source on a regime whose internal politics remain opaque to us, despite the $100 billion we spend on the intelligence community.”

Bo faces allegations that he misused his authority to expand control of security forces. His emphasis on his family’s militant past—his father, Bo Yibo, was a communist military commander during the Chinese Civil War in the 1930s—could threaten the peace in the Chongqing region.

China said last month that Mr. Bo—once a front-runner for a position on the Politburo Standing Committee, the nation’s top decision-making body—had been dismissed from his party posts and placed under investigation for unspecified “serious disciplinary violations.” The government also said his wife was in custody as a suspect in the murder of Neil Heywood, a British businessman who was close to the Bo family. …

By visiting the military base in Yunnan province, Mr. Bo appeared to be flaunting his revolutionary ancestry and courting political support from the People’s Liberation Army at a time when his career was in crisis, according to Communist Party and military officials. “Bo’s trip to Yunnan caught people at the highest level off guard,” said one high-ranking military officer.

Mr. Bo’s ties to the military and his irregular use of his police forces are now key elements of the investigation at the heart of China’s worst political crisis in more than two decades, the officials said. The saga also could affect the contours of a planned leadership succession in the fall.

Chinese authorities have questioned several generals about their close ties to Bo and could delay a transition of power to keep the military under tighter control, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The principal cog in China’s effort to influence U.S. thought leaders is China Daily, an English-language newspaper that takes an uncritical look at the People’s Republic of China and toes the Communist party line on a range of issues, including the economy and politics.

The paper, which is engaged in an advertising partnership with the Washington Post that some experts describe as unethical, is delivered on a weekly basis to nearly every office on Capitol Hill and is readily available in newspaper dispensers across the city.

“It’s in all of the offices,” an aide to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.), an outspoken critic of China, told the Free Beacon. “It’s one more component of a very broad-based campaign to influence U.S. public opinion.”

China is waging a carefully orchestrated campaign to push its party propaganda among unsuspecting Americans and D.C. insiders alike, the source said.

“We should emphasize the broad nature of this,” said the staffer. “The sum total is greater than any one part.”

China Daily routinely distorts the news in service of the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda.

On Tuesday, for instance, China Daily reported on the “continued progress” of China’s economy. Yet the Financial Times ran a story late last week detailing China’s widening trade deficit.

The paper has also claimed that the Chinese government has no interest in Syria’s ongoing civil war. Yet Foreign Policy magazine recently laid out a litany of diplomatic, economic, and security interests that China has in the Middle East, particularly in Syria.

Some congressional offices say they see through China Daily’s propaganda.

“China should be happy to hear that their investment in China Daily to push their ridiculous propaganda has a real impact—filling the bottom of our recycling bin,” said a senior Democratic Hill staffer. “Despite what many Republicans think [about Democrats], communism has no place in any serious office on Capitol Hill.”

The Washington Free Beacon could not verify that last statement.

On the newspaper front, it is unclear if readers understand that they are being misled, said Larry Wortzel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

“China has an active propaganda and perception management program,” Wortzel said. “The Communist Party Propaganda Department is aggressive in placing advertising, disguised as news, in many American newspapers.”

Print newspapers are not the Communist Party’s sole means of dissemination. Television and Internet operations are also beginning to spring up.

In early February, the Chinese launched an American version of China Central Television (CCTV) based in Washington, D.C.

CCTV is a state-controlled news operation that routinely releases flattering portraits of the ruling Communist regime.

“They’re trying to get into the mainstream,” said the Rohrabacher staffer. “Each one piece [of China’s media blitz] has not [had] a great effect, but there’s a cumulative effect. All of these themes, ideas, and concepts will work into other areas.”

China experts have noted that the Communist government is especially concerned with foreign propaganda.

“The Chinese government puts a high value on propaganda work, describing it as the life blood (shengmingxian) of the Party-State in the current era,” Anne-Marie Brady, an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told the USCC in 2009. “China’s foreign propaganda experts are extremely critical of what they call the ‘Western media’s ideological assault on the rest of the world.’”

Brady further noted that China promotes its ideology overseas using “newspapers, radio and television stations” and through “cultural activities” such as “the teaching of Chinese language internationally, which includes the rapid spread of Confucius Institutes; and special activities organized for the Overseas Chinese community such as conferences and ‘root-seeking’ (xun gen) cultural tours.”

Some national security experts warned that China is winning the PR war, particularly because America does not have the ability to wage similar campaigns in the mainland.

“We have a Chinese state-owned entity publishing in the U.S., but the great violation of principle is on reciprocity,” said Stephen Yates, a former national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. “Does the China Daily or any other newspaper of record [in China] allow for a regular U.S. government paid insert? I doubt it.”

However, Bill Reinsch, who is also a member of the USCC, believes that “most people” are aware of China’s blatant efforts to sway U.S. public opinion.

“I think most people see it for what it is—an effort to spread the Chinese government’s message,” Reinsch said.  “These things are not free and independent media operations, and I think most everybody knows that.”

U.S. officials and outside China watchers said the ouster of Bo Xilai, who was behind a Cultural Revolution-style revival of Maoism, signals high-level divisions within the Party hierarchy months before a major leadership change.

A U.S. official who specializes in China affairs said Bo’s campaign in Chongqing to return to Mao-era Communist fanaticism through grassroots nationalist-Communist programs raised hackles in the Chinese capital.

“This violates a whole set of cardinal principles of the current Chinese Communist Party collective dictatorship, which demands its local Party chiefs do not make any waves by starting any political initiative on your own,” the official said.

Bo’s self-promotion and political initiatives likely upset the ruling Politburo, which demands that it—not local chiefs—decides important issues.

Bo upset the powers in Beijing by arousing populism that cautious leaders believe could shake the foundations of Communist rule, as happened during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s when Mao Zedong unleashed the Red Guard on the party and the country’s institutions.

Without mentioning any details for the ousters, Xinhua reported from Chongqing that Zhang Dejiang was appointed Party chief of Chongqing, replacing Bo based on a “decision of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee” on Thursday.

Bo was stripped of his post, as well as his membership on the standing committee and his membership on the CPC Chongqing municipal committee.

The events of the last several weeks represent high political drama for the Communist regime in Beijing. Leadership struggles rarely are played out so publicly.

U.S. intelligence analysts have been closely watching the senior Chinese leadership since Feb. 6, when one of Bo’s former deputies, former Public Security chief Wang Lijun, fled Chongqing and sought to defect at the U.S. Consulate in neighboring Chengdu.

The White House turned Wang away over concerns that granting asylum would upset the visit to the United States by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping. Rather than return Wang to security forces loyal to Bo, he was given to a senior official of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, highlighting what U.S. officials said was a major power struggle between Bo and Beijing.

A defense official said the mishandling of the Wang defection sent the wrong message to Chinese leaders because turning him away condoned Bo’s efforts to seize the former poice chief by surrounding the consulate with security agents and police vehicles.

“Beijing’s leaders may now think the U.S. government can be intimidated in a crisis by a few police cars,” the official said.

Chinese blogs in recent days were filled with postings, likely from officials seeking to spin public debate, by saying the failure to defend Wang is a sign of U.S. decline.

By contrast, in 1989, President George W. Bush directly invited Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi to seek shelter in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where he stayed for 18 months before being allowed to leave the country.

Bo’s dismissal came a day after Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao issued an unusual public rebuke of “Chongqing authorities,” who were told to “seriously” reflect and learn from the Wang incident.

Bo dispatched armored personnel carriers to the consulate in Chengdu upon learning of Wang’s defection there. But his forces were unable to prevent Wang from traveling to Beijing, which triggered speculation that his chances for remaining in power had dimmed.

Bo then appeared on Chinese state television Feb. 21 leading analysts to suspect he had weathered the purge. But, during the recent Communist Party meeting in Beijing, state media reported that he was missing from one of the sessions. That was the first sign his fortune was declining.

The U.S. official said the replacement of Bo was “a case of a self-aggrandizing, charismatic leftist Communist boss versus the boring, run-of-the-mill CCP collective dictatorship. In the end, the collective dictatorship won.”

Stephen Yates, a China affairs specialist who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney during the George W. Bush administration, said the dramatic events leading up to Bo’s ouster shows that the current Communist system bears no resemblance to modern, transparent, accountable forms of government that guide China’s neighbors and regional competitors.

“Chinese leaders behave as if the foundations of their current system and their positions are tenuous,” Yates told the Free Beacon. “Bo was playing with ideological fire in a field of dry tinder.”

“There is nothing more threatening to the future of Communist Party rule in China than a popular movement that reminds people of past ideals the national leadership isn’t living up to,” Yates said.

Dissident groups such as the Falun Gong spiritual movement also do this by reminding others that the Communist Party is not Chinese and does not define China.

Taiwan also undermines party rule in China by showing that Chinese culture and modern democracy are compatible, Yates said.

Regarding Party factionalism, Yates said, “What’s going on in Chinese politics is more akin to a mafia state struggling to hold on in the face of growing popular dissatisfaction and less fear that any challenge to the system is futile.”

“They had to sack Bo to remind all willing to listen that you either stand with the group or the group stands on you,” Yates said.

Said a U.S. official familiar with intelligence assessments: “Bo’s ouster probably has more to do with his personal political problems, and isn’t symbolic of a wider split in party ranks.”

John Tkacik, a former State Department China specialist, said purges such as that of Bo usually reflect high-level factionalism, but more than likely are based on corruption.

He said another example was the case of former Beijing Party boss Chen Xitong, who was a major rival to Chinese leader Jiang Zemin and who was removed from power in 1995 ostensibly for real estate corruption. Chen was replaced with a Jiang protégé.

“China’s factions tend to be personality-centric and involve extended networks of personal relationships, not really ideology-centered as it was in the Cultural Revolution,” Tkacik told the Free Beacon. “It’s true that the China Youth League faction tends to focus more on domestic social policy, while the Shanghai faction focuses on China’s national security and military and is grounded in a neo-nationalism. But that’s not to say the factions disagree on the doctrine, only that they stress different interests.”

Tkacik said it is not easy to tell the real reasons behind Bo’s firing. But one possible explanation is that Bo may have overdramatized his anti-corruption and Red Revival campaigns.

The high-profile public campaigns may have been intended to “deflect attention from his personal misbehavior rather than being a sincere commitment to old-time-religion style Communist orthodoxy,” he said.

Tkacik said Bo’s replacement, Zhang Dejiang, is a well-known leftist who was educated at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang with a degree in economics. Zhang is a stalwart of the Shanghai Faction, not the more reformist China Youth League faction that is generally identified with lame-duck Party General Secretary Hu Jintao, he said.

“So this either was not a result of inter-factional frictions within the Party, or the Youth League faction was unsuccessful,” Tkacik said, stressing that he believes the entire affair does not signal any meaningful change in Chinese leadership doctrine or political alignments.

An Obama administration official said, “The whole incident has served as a wake up call for China experts around the world who have long predicted an end to all power struggles in Beijing.”

Human rights groups have been silent on the Obama administration’s decision to turn away a senior Communist defector.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is investigating the Wang Lijun case and has asked for documents related to the affair. A committee spokesman said so far the State Department has failed to comply with the committee’s requests.

The U.S. official said the case of Bo versus Beijing was similar to the situation in Moscow prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“But the tragedy for China is that Bo is no Yeltsin, and there is no Gorbachev within the collective dictatorship,” the official said. “In the Soviet case, Yeltsin won over Gorbachev, who willingly conceded defeat.”

According to U.S. national security officials, new indications of potentially destabilizing factionalism surfaced last week during the attempted defection to the United States of a senior Chinese police official.

Wang Lijun, a deputy mayor in Chongqing, provided explosive details about senior Chinese leaders during an overnight stay and debriefing at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, in southern China.

Wang’s intelligence supports the claims of U.S. officials who believe a faction of hardline nationalists within the party are seeking power. They oppose the more moderate, but still communist, faction headed by Hu Jintao that currently holds power in the Politburo, which runs China’s government.

The power struggle is playing out against China’s plans for a smooth leadership transition during an upcoming major Party conference this fall, when Hu is expected to relinquish power—in part or in whole—to Xi.

The information provided by Wang Lijun is said to include details on Bo Xilai, the regional Party official in Chongqing and one of the leading nationalist hardliners, and Zhou Yongkang, China’s highest ranking security official and member of the nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo.

Within U.S. intelligence agencies the debate over the leadership split has pitted Asian affairs intelligence analysts against operations officers engaged in running agents in China and gathering communications intelligence.

The analysts, led by National Intelligence Officer for East Asia Paul Heer, insist there are no significant antagonistic leadership factions in the upper reaches of the Party and that the transition to Xi will be uneventful.

Other intelligence officials insist the split is real, arguing that the numerous signs of fighting could result in a putsch by nationalists in the next several months, bringing more anti-U.S. and doctrinaire communists to power.

According to the officials, the key threat to Xi is Zhou Yongkang, who is considered the most powerful hardliner. Described as the most powerful policeman in the nation, Zhou could arrange the usurpation of Xi and upset the smooth transition from current President Hu Jintao to Xi.

“Zhou is China’s top policeman and is waiting in the wings and has supporters,” said one well-placed administration official. “The message the Chinese are sending is that if Xi is too soft on the Americans and bows to the Americans [during the visit], this opens up an opportunity for Zhou to seize the succession.”

The dangers of a destabilizing leadership struggle have been advanced in the past by former Pentagon policymaker and China specialist Michael Pillsbury.

In his landmark 2000 book, China Debates the Future Security Environment, Pillsbury wrote that Chinese factions rarely disagree in public but that the factions generally break down between “orthodox” communists and “reformers.” For example, the hardliners are convinced that the Untied States is in an irreversible decline, while reformers argue that the United States is likely to remain the sole superpower for the foreseeable future.

Heer, by contrast, stated in a 2000 Foreign Affairs article headlined “A House United” that viewing Beijing’s behavior toward Washington as driven by factional leadership politics was “misguided and even dangerous.”

One official said the leadership struggle in China carries the danger of a rapid worsening in relations between the U.S. and China—or even conflict.

“The potential for miscalculation is enormous,” the official said. “If the No. 2 economy in the world is taken over by an anti-American Chinese policeman, we are in trouble.”

This official criticized the blind spot in U.S. intelligence. He said it is a result of pro-China policies in the Bush and Obama administrations, both of which curtailed spying on China to avoid upsetting diplomatic and economic relations.

Said a second U.S. official: “Right now, Xi Jinping is pretty well-positioned politically. He has the support of key Communist Party elites, and the PLA.”

Former State Department China analyst John Tkacik identified two opposing factions within the Chinese leadership: the “princelings,” or sons and daughters of Party and military revolutionaries, and the “China Youth League faction” that has been successful in controlling domestic policy.

“Zhou Yongkang has been China’s top cop for the past ten years, and he knows where the bodies are buried,” Tkacik said. “If he were to move against anyone, it would be against someone in the Youth League Faction. And it is plausible that this faction would try to undermine some maverick self-promoter in the Party like Chongqing’s ‘princeling’ Party Secretary Bo Xilai who’s a bit too much of a Maoist, leftist populist, and whom very few in any faction like anyway.”

Bo has sought to portray himself as a populist-nationalist and is seeking a seat on the nine-member Standing Committee during the upcoming Party conference set for the fall. In an open letter published on the Internet, Wang Lijun criticized Bo as a major organized crime figure in Chongqing.

According to a U.S. official, reports from China on Monday said Zhou has taken control of Chongqing and appears to be preventing Hu Jintao’s Beijing “center” forces from fully investigating or arresting Bo.

The administration is portraying the Xi visit as an opportunity to gauge U.S.-China relations in the future. Washington has major concerns about China’s military buildup, secretive nuclear arms modernization, aggressive cyber espionage, and preparation for future cyber warfare, along with other issues such as currency valuation and other financial and trade issues.

Other topics expected to be discussed when Xi meets President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are China’s refusal to support a U.N. resolution condemning Syria’s government for its crackdown on civilians, Beijing’s missile and nuclear proliferation, and China’s siding with fraternal communist ally North Korea on Pyongyang’s recent sinking of a South Korean warship and shelling of a South Korean border island.

China’s human rights abuses are not expected to be a major topic of discussion during Xi’s visit.

Xi will not hold any public appearances or take part in any press conferences during the visit, which is expected to generate some street protests from human rights advocates. He is scheduled to meet the president and vice president during the visit. Other meetings are expected to include sessions with the secretaries of State and Defense and senior House and Senate leaders.

He is also scheduled to travel to Iowa and Los Angeles during the trip.