OTTAWA — The Conservative government's ambiguous relationship with China will be under the microscope this week when Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes his first major trip to Asia.

Harper will be meeting in Hanoi with the other 20 leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Forum, an organization that typically focuses on trade and global security issues.

But it is Harper's foreign policy approach on two massive issues - Canada's dealings with China and its potential role in quelling tensions with North Korea - that will likely garner the most attention back home.

Discussions have been under way to try to arrange a bilateral meeting between Harper and Chinese President Hu Jintao. But some observers found it significant that, only days before the kick-off of the forum, no meeting had been confirmed yet.

"That's actually quite serious, because that means the Chinese want to tell us they're annoyed," said Michael Byers, the Canada Research Chair in global politics and international law at the University of British Columbia.

"For them to be delaying confirmation of a meeting between the world's eighth largest economy and one of their most important sources of raw natural resources is an indication Mr. Harper has some work to do."

Since the Conservatives took office in January, there have been a number of irritants in the Canada-China relationship.

Among them were moves to bestow the Dalai Lama with honourary Canadian citizenship and public complaints about corporate espionage by Chinese agents in Canada. There have also been few official contacts between Chinese and Canadian diplomats or politicians in recent months.

Harper's parliamentary secretary, Jason Kenney, has long been a critic of China's poor human rights record, something that observers say would have been duly noted by the Chinese government.

Fred Bild, who was Canadian ambassador to China from 1990 to 1995, said he suspects the Conservative government has simply not come up with a policy on China yet - at its own peril.

"You have to have a strategy to deal with China, you can't just deal with it as if it were Liechtenstein or something," said Bild, now a professor of Asian studies at the University of Montreal.

"When there's pressure on . . . they run scared and don't know what to do, and in some ways it makes it worse. I pity my successors in Beijing and in Ottawa who have to deal with these issues, because this is the worst possible circumstance in which to operate, when you don't have a clear direction from the top."

Bild notes that the number of Chinese tourists and students coming to Canada has dropped precipitously in recent years.

All this has alarmed many in the business community, who fear Canada will be left behind in reaping some of the potential trade and investment rewards of tapping into an economic powerhouse.

"Definitely as a country we need to be putting a lot more resources into our emerging markets strategy," said Shirley-Ann George, vice-president of international issues for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

"We need a cohesive strategy that involves the provinces, we need more feet on the ground, more experts on the ground in places like China and India. Other countries are having better, more resourced strategies than Canada, and every day that they move further ahead we move further behind."

The North Korea nuclear issue will be the focus of most international attention at the meeting of APEC leaders, since five of the countries involved in talks with Pyongyang will be present.

Canada is not one of those nations, but Wade Huntley of the Liu Centre for Global Issues in Vancouver says Ottawa can play an important diplomatic role by simply keeping the pressure on for action.

He noted that, while the international community springs to action in the wake of any fresh nuclear scare, attention drifts when things are quiet.

"One of the most important things that Canada and a number of other countries could do is make sure that the issue stays on the agenda of the principal countries of the six-party talks, and that those six countries never forget that the rest of the world is watching," said Huntley.

The APEC leaders will also be discussing economic issues, particularly the fate of the World Trade Organization's troubled talks on trade liberalization. In the meantime, the U.S. government has suggested that it would like to pursue a discussion on a free-trade zone among all APEC members.

Canadian officials have suggested there is interest in that concept in Ottawa too.

"Certainly there are different views with regard to it, but many like-minded economies like ourselves want to look at all options with regard to trade liberalization," said one official.