By Jason Szep

DAYTON, Ohio, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Republican front-runner John McCain said on Wednesday he would keep pressure on China to improve its human rights record and expand U.S.-Sino ties if he won the U.S. presidency.

The four-term Arizona senator said he would also seek to make the U.S. military presence in Asia permanent, or "as long as nations want us there," and that the United States must adapt to a shift in economic power from Europe to Asia.

"We have to have both a short-term and a long-term strategy to deal with what is a reality -- a China superpower," McCain told a group of four reporters aboard his campaign bus.

In the short term, that would mean avoiding military confrontations with China while building up relations with Beijing and other Asian governments, he said.

But McCain would also want to see democratic improvements in Communist China if he were elected on Nov. 4 to succeed President George W. Bush.

"I would make it clear that we remain advocates for progress, human rights, democratization," he said. "I would make it clear that we would continue to strengthen our ties to the countries in the region."

McCain, 71, also acknowledged that five years of war in Iraq had distracted U.S. policymakers from economic and diplomatic opportunities in Asia and other regions.

He said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mishandled the war during the first four years of the conflict.

"We're fixing it now and we are succeeding," said McCain, an early advocate of the U.S. military's current "surge" strategy of sending about 30,000 more troops to Iraq.

"But the price of failure in those other four years has manifest itself in a lot of other ways."

McCain, who would be the oldest person to win a first U.S. presidential term, has cast himself as more seasoned in foreign policy than his Democratic rivals Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

He criticized Obama for saying in August that he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan to strike al Qaeda targets with or without approval from the Pakistani government.

"There are ways of working with leaders of other countries and the one thing you don't want to do is embarrass them," McCain said. "I know these people and I've known them for many years, and I know I can work with them."

"And I would not broadcast to the world that I am going to bomb a sovereign nation in order to accomplish my goals."

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