one-to-many: making Hibernate select the reference's id instead of joining it

I have two classes stored in my database using Hibernate. Let's call them Container and Item. Item has a one-to-many relation to Container:

@entity(name = "containers")
public class Container {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private long id;
}

@entity(name = "items")
public class Item {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private long id;

    @ManyToOne
    @JoinColumn(name = "container_id")
    private Container container;
}

I want to select select all for all items the tuple [ (long)item.id, (long)item.container_id ], but Hibernate seems to insist on retrieving [ (long)item.id, (Container)item.container ], introducing a useless (and expensive) join.

I tried that criteria query:

Criteria criteria = session.
    createCriteria(Link.class).
    add(Restrictions.isNotNull("container")).
    setProjection(Projections.projectionList().
        add(Projections.id()).
        add(Projections.property("container")));

Is there a matching criteria query. Has to be possible without HQL queries or native SQL queries, hasn't it?

Edit 1: Working HQL query:

session.createQuery("SELECT item.id, item.container.id " +
                    "FROM items AS item " +
                    开发者_StackOverflow"WHERE item.container <> NULL")

Edit 2: FetchType.LAZY is not an option.

Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Link.class);
criteria.createAlias("container", "containerAlias");
criteria.add(Restrictions.isNotNull("containerAlias.id"));
criteria.setProjection(Projections.projectionList()
    .add(Projections.id())
    .add(Projections.property("containerAlias.id")));

It should be sufficient to add a fetch = FetchType.LAZY attribute to the @ManyToOne annotation. If you've annotated an ID column in Container, the test for whether item.container is null should not require a join.