By Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING, Dec 11 (Reuter) - An influential Chinese official magazine accused the United States on Monday of seeking to contain China and Russia, arguing that Washington sees them as easy targets because of their relatively weak economies.

"The main targets of U.S. containment are China and Russia because the economies of these two countries are not strong enough and they are easier to contain," the weekly Outlook magazine said in its December 11 edition.

"The United States seeks more cooperation than containment with the European Union and Japan, but it seeks more containment than cooperation with China and Russia."

Containment was a U.S. Cold War strategy to prevent the spread of communism from the Soviet bloc.

Headlined "How do we recognise and face the world?," the article said it was "inevitable" after the Soviet collapse that the United States would try to contain other countries' development to retain its status as the world's only superpower.

U.S. officials have said Washington is seeking to "engage, not contain" China, although senior officials have warned that a need to contain China could arise in future.

But Outlook, an official Xinhua news agency publication seen as a reliable window on Communist Party and state policy, said that an ulterior strategy of containment was already under way.

It said U.S. policy toward China was "soft containment" and that "engage" to the Americans meant "infiltration" and "things developing according to (U.S.) intentions."

The magazine questioned Washington's continued restriction of transfers of military and civilian technology to China.

It asked why Washington permitted countries with per-capita incomes higher than China's to enjoy "developing country" status in the World Trade Organisation while blocking China's WTO entry as anything but a "developed country."

The United States, the European Union, Japan and Canada so far have blocked Beijing's bid to join the WTO with exemptions from the tough free-trade rules that bind developed countries.

Outlook asked why Washington had sold offensive weapons to China's arch-rival, Taiwan, and allowed the island's President Lee Teng-hui to visit the United States in June despite U.S. promises that there would be no official contact.

Washington has agreed to sell 150 F-16 fighters to Taiwan.

China has staged a series of missile tests and military exercises near Taiwan in what has been viewed on the island as a show of force to discourage Taipei from seeking a higher and more independent international profile.

Beijing has considered Taiwan a rebel province since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 and has sought to push the island into diplomatic isolation.

The magazine also questioned Washington's attacks on China's family planning policy, which restricts couples to one child to check the growth of its population, which at 1.2 billion is the world's largest.

It said the United States sought to sow discord between China and its neighbours by spreading the "China threat theory" and was inciting countries to challenge China's disputed claim to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

The magazine said the United States, in criticising China's human rights record, "craves nothing short of chaos" in China .

It challenged U.S. President Bill Clinton's reasons for meeting Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who has been at loggerheads with Beijing since fleeing to India in 1959 after an abortive anti-Chinese uprising.

Beijing regards the Dalai Lama as a political "splittist" seeking Tibet's independence from China.