CHARLESTON, S.C. – Bearing a stern warning about a burgeoning Chinese threat to America's national security, Rep. Duncan Hunter yesterday sought to jump-start his long-shot presidential campaign in a key state with a message built around signature issues that have been central to his political career.

The Alpine Republican laid out his case for his party's presidential nomination before about 100 people on the campus of the conservative Charleston Southern University. During a 20-minute speech and a 48-minute question period, he underscored his long history of support for a muscular military, tight border security and strong remedies for a trade imbalance that he says is financing China's burgeoning military challenge to U.S. interests.

The trip marked Hunter's first foray into a crucial presidential battleground. South Carolina's early GOP presidential primary election, closely following the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, has helped shape the final outcome in past contests.

Hunter arrived in the state Thursday to tour a steel manufacturing plant. His schedule also included a round of local radio and television interviews.

The usual trappings of a full-fledged presidential campaign were conspicuously missing. Hunter traveled with no staff support, which may have explained the fact that only one local television channel covered his campus event, along with a crew from C-SPAN.

That may change once Hunter forms an official presidential exploratory committee that is legally empowered to raise and dispense campaign money.

In any event, Hunter made it clear that his official candidacy is a foregone conclusion, saying: “We're preparing to run. While the lawyers are crossing the T's and dotting I's, we're down here getting a running start.”

At Charleston Southern University, the veteran of 26 years in the U.S. House found himself fielding politely posed but hostile queries from three members of the campus Young Democrats organization. While Hunter showed no sign of being thrown off balance, the quizzing may have been a surprise given Charleston Southern's political reputation and its self-described role as a Christian school.

The questions probed his ties to a defense contractor identified as a co-conspirator in the bribery case that sent former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham to prison; suggested he was trying to cover up the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal to avoid embarrassing San Diego-based Titan Corp., which had interpreters there; and claimed that a member of his Armed Services Committee staff had slipped a provision into a military authorizations bill that dismantled an inspector general's operation that was uncovering corruption in the Iraq reconstruction efforts.

While denying the implications of all three questions – and suggesting that the question about Cunningham had been written by the staff of a local Democratic congressman – Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was calm and measured in his responses. As the session was wrapping up, he turned to the trio.

“I want to give you guys the last shot. Do you have anything left?” Hunter asked.

They didn't, and afterward he posed for a photo with Tyler Jones, president of the school's Young Democrats and the one who asked about Hunter's ties to Brent Wilkes, one of two contractors accused of having bribed Cunningham.

Responding to the question about Wilkes earlier, Hunter said: “When you open up the doors to a fundraiser and five or six or seven hundred folks come in, you don't have a crystal ball that tells which ones are going to have a problem five or 10 or 15 years off in the future.”

During his speech, Hunter concentrated on national security.

“China is stepping into the superpower shoes that were vacated by the Soviet Union,” he warned. “And they're doing that, they're assembling this formidable military machine, with American trade dollars. And those trade dollars flow down a one-way street – a street in which they receive some 200 billion more dollars a year than we receive from them.”

A longtime critic of free-trade agreements, Hunter blamed the situation on Chinese trade policies – including tax rebates to the country's exporters – that are made all the more onerous by the relative openness of the U.S. market and by the Beijing government's practice of manipulating its currency's exchange rate to give Chinese exporters an advantage over U.S. competitors.

He also touted his role in winning legislative authorization 700 miles of fencing along portions of the U.S.-Mexican border most susceptible to smugglers bringing in groups of illegal immigrants. He argued that border security is no longer an immigration issue but one inextricably linked to national security.

As the event was breaking up, at least one Republican activist, David Weiss, director of alumni affairs for the school, said Hunter's presentation had won his provisional support.

“Of the usual suspects, I'd have to give him the early lead (for my vote),” Weiss said. “His conservatism would fit well (with state Republicans). His name recognition would be a problem. He'll need grass-roots support if he is going to make headway.”

That assessment is shared by many political analysts of southern politics, who point out that Hunter, a neophyte in presidential politics, is virtually unknown among voters outside his San Diego-area constituency. He will be competing for the GOP nomination with a growing field of higher-profile Republicans, including Arizona Sen. John McCain, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

“(South Carolina) is not a state where you can just kind of come in and, just in couple of days, kind of take it over,” said Ferrel Guillory of the University of North Carolina, a longtime political scientist in the Southeast. “You've got to work at it. Particularly a guy like Duncan Hunter, who is just not known at all. Somebody is gonna ask him, 'Who's your mama?' The good old Southern questions. 'Who's your daddy? Where'd they come from?' ”