The varied comments of Ms. Rice and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer underscored the uneasiness that Ms. Rice has found this week in Asia and Australia, a region that the United States once dominated as a superpower but now has to navigate uneasily amid China's spreading influence.

Ms. Rice's criticism of China was unusually tough, especially since she was speaking in China's front yard and was planning to meet here later in the week with Mr. Downer and the foreign minister of Japan, Taro Aso, to discuss security issues. Mr. Aso has angered leaders in Beijing with his own criticism of China's military buildup.

"There is no doubt that, as with any complex relationship, there are difficult issues as well as positive elements," Ms. Rice said of the Chinese, praising American cooperation with Beijing on North Korea and Iran before going on to criticize Chinese military, economic and human rights policies.

Noting that at the recent National Peoples Conference, the Chinese announced a 14 percent increase in military spending, Ms. Rice said: "That's a lot, and China should undertake to be transparent about what that means."

She went on to refer to charges in the Bush administration that China has kept its currency artificially high in order to pump out exports, and to say that China had a poor record on protecting intellectual property rights, opening its government-controlled markets to foreign investment and protecting religious freedoms.

The planned meeting with Mr. Downer and Mr. Aso of Japan on Saturday, billed as a "trilateral security forum," has stirred attention in East Asia as Japan's relations with China have plummeted amid rising nationalist sentiment on both sides. The two countries are still arguing over issues going back to Japan's invasion in the 1930's.

But the three-way meeting, coupled with President Bush's recently agreeing to condone India's nuclear weapons program and supply nuclear aid to India, has also underscored concerns in Australia that the United States is trying to forge closer military cooperation countries surrounding that encircle China.

Before Ms. Rice arrived, Mr. Downer told Sky News: "We don't support a policy of containment of china. I don't think that's going to be a productive or constructive policy at all." His comments were described in the Australian press as an effort to assuage concerns in Beijing about American-Austrlaian policies.

Appearing at his news conference with Ms. Rice, Mr. Downer said that the United States and Australia were in agreement on the issue, however, "we've never had a concern that the United States was pursuing a policy of containment with China." He said Australia felt "comfortable" with American policies on the issue.

Later, Ms. Rice was asked at by a university student about efforts to push against China. She said that if China cooperated economically and politically with other countries, its influence would be "terrific – not just good, terrific."

The mixed comments about China came on a day in which Ms. Rice sought to reinforce relations with Australia after a period in which some Australians have felt neglected. Ms. Rice cancelled a planned visit here in January, and there has not been a permanent ambassador in Australia since 2004.

After a rousing speech to sailors aboard the U.S.S. Port Royal, a missile cruiser headed for the Persian Gulf, Ms. Rice spoke before an audience of a few hundred students from various universities and was confronted with tough questions about American policies toward Iraq, the Palestinians, China and civil liberties at home.

She had a private dinner Thursday evening with Prime Minister John Howard.

At the university forum, three hecklers – shouting "You're a war criminal!" and "Iraqi blood is on your hands!" were quickly ejected as Ms. Rice said: "I'm very glad to see that democracy is alive and well at the university. I'm glad that it will also be alive and well at the University of Kabul and the University of Baghdad."

Addressing Iraq, Ms. Rice said she was confident that Iraqis will forge a democracy and quell the insurgency, "but we must be patient with these people and patient with the course of democracy."

As she has often in these settings, Ms. Rice spoke in fervent personal terms about democracy, recalling her own coming of age in Birmingham in the 1950's and 1960's, when it was in the grip of the Ku Klux Klan, bombings and a sense of hopelessness about the possibility of racial justice.

"In my lifetime, Birmingham transformed," Ms. Rice added. "America transformed. I stand before you as a black Secretary of State, something that I think 30 or 40 years ago would have been thought impossible."

The audience applauded warmly when she spoke about herself. But though politely addressed, most of the students' questions were mostly critical, apparently reflecting polls that in Australia, as in many other countries, the United States has negative poll ratings.

One questioner noted that the United States had a low percentage of its national economy devoted to foreign aid to poor countries, compared to other rich countries, but Ms. Rice said that the Bush administration had increased foreign aid by 50 percent in the last five years and tripled foreign aid to Africa.

Asked about setting a goal of .7 percent of the national economy for foreign aid, Ms. Rice said: "I don't believe that a specific target is really the appropriate way to think about this." She explained that in the past American assistance had been wasted and spent on corrupt regimes, and that her government was trying to redirect aid as it increased.

She referred, he says, to Tuesday's "informal" gathering of Security Council delegates hosted by the French UN mission. During that session, the official says, 13 of 15 representatives expressed agreement with a French-British draft proposal to have the Securitiy Council issue a statement giving Iran two weeks to comply with the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the watchdog organization that works to prevent nuclear proliferation.

The two holdouts, not surprisingly, have been Russia and China. While officials from the two nations have agreed in principle that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons and expressed some frustration with Iran's intransigence, they have both been reluctant to act too forcefully or quickly against Tehran. According to US officials, since last Friday, in a series of meetings in New York among the veto-wielding "permanent five" members of the Security Council-the US, Great Britain, France, Russia and China-the Russians have pushed for changes in the French-British draft that, one US official complains, "designed to gut the proposed statement." In particular, one source says, Russia is opposing setting a short deadline for Iran's compliance and is trying to move the issue out of Security Council and back to the less potent IAEA board.

"They're afraid that a tough measure (will provoke) Iran into an irrational reaction" that would spur the West to demand global economic sanctions," says the US official. The Russians, he says, "are not ready for sanctions. They want to buy time, stretch the process out." But no one is making it easy on them. In addition to Rice's entreaty, US Ambassasdor to Russia William Burns paid a call Tuesday on Lavrov, and, according to the Interfax News Agency, French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy also telephoned him.

The US and its Western European allies aren't ready to discuss economic sanctions. But officials say some diplomats have begun talking quietly to one another and to other countries about where they might squeeze their commercial relations with Iran to force the Islamist regime to suspend its research on uranium enrichment and other techologies essential to constructing a bomb.

The backroom wrangling about the wording of the Security Council statement will intensify next Monday when Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns and his counterparts from the other Permanent Members of the Security Council plus Germany convene in Manhattan. As she did with Lavrov, Rice is expected to weigh in with her peers from the other countries, but it is possible that the Iran diplomacy may reach even higher levels of government. If it becomes necessary, says one US official, President Bush himself could place a call or two to Moscow and Beijing.

It was a time of "church bombings, and of white supremacists, and of the Ku Klux Klan", the US Secretary of State told a crowd of 300 students at the Sydney Con-servatorium of Music yesterday.

"It was a time when it was perhaps hard to believe in democracy in America let alone democracy in any other place in the world, but in my lifetime Birmingham transformed, America transformed. I stand before you as the black secretary of state, something that I think 30 or 40 years ago would have been impossible," she said.

But some in the audience were having none of it. As Dr Rice drew parallels between Iraq today and her upbringing, three protesters interrupted her. "Iraqi blood is on your hands and you cannot wash that blood away," two of them yelled before security guards removed them.

About 40 anti-war activists had earlier clashed with police outside the conservatorium, resulting in five arrests.

Inside, Dr Rice was undeterred, retorting she was "very glad to see democracy is alive and well here at the university … I'm also glad that democracy will now also be alive and well at the university of Kabul and the university of Baghdad."

Dr Rice went on to take 45 minutes of tough questions from the students - compared with just two from journalists earlier in the day after she met the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer.

One after the other they came. Karen, from Macquarie University asked why the US, currently "ranked as one of the lowest OECD nations as far as foreign aid goes" didn't commit to a higher percentage of its gross national income. Jeremy from the University of Sydney asked what Dr Rice meant by her oft-used term "freedom" when people were locked up indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay without charge.

And Ross from the same university asked whether the US's policies on rendition and the abuses at Abu Ghraib didn't "undermine what America stands for".

Dr Rice admitted Abu Ghraib "was a disgrace" but said "rendition" - the removal of terrorist suspects to countries that practise torture - had been done "well before September 11". When extradition was not an option, "sometimes you have to take people off the streets", she said.

"These are hard issues and we as democracies are struggling with how to deal with the war."

During the political debate there were moments of self-deprecation. Dr Rice, a highly accomplished pianist, explained how she learnt to read music before she could read words, but reached a point during her college years when she realised "I was going to probably end up teaching 13-year-olds to play Beethoven" rather than playing Carnegie Hall.

"If there is any lesson from that it's if you haven't found exactly what you're interested in yet, keep searching and maybe like me you can play piano on Sunday and foreign policy during the week," she told her audience.

Soon after Rice began her speech, two protesters were removed from the room after shouting "Condoleezza Rice you are a war criminal" and "Iraqi blood is on your hands and you cannot wash that blood away."

Rice, who is on a three-day trip to Australia, immediately shot back she was glad democracy was alive at the university, where she said people were free to speak their minds.

"I am also especially glad to note that democracy will now also be alive and well at the University of Kabul and the University of Baghdad," she said.

About 15 minutes into her address another protester interrupted her speech when she referred to freedom. "What kind of freedom are you talking about, you are a murderer," said the demonstrator before being led away.

Several protesters were moved away from outside the auditorium before Rice began. Sharp-shooters were positioned on surrounding buildings and security forces looked on from boats in Sydney Harbor.

Australia was among one of the first countries to offer troops to help with the U.S. war effort in Iraq and still has about 1,300 in and around Iraq, with a promise to stay into 2007.

But with support dwindling for the war in Australia, Rice sought to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and said Iraqis were now more free.