抖阴ap

BEIJING — On the second full day of his visit to China, President Barack Obama prepared early today for a formal meeting with his host, President Hu Jintao, in which he was expected to press the Chinese leader for possible new sanctions on Iran, a stepped-up Chinese role in Afghanistan and the relative strengths of their countries’ currencies.

The leaders, who met Monday night for a private dinner, also will try to find agreement on some modest climate- change goals for the environmental summit in Copenhagen and on edging North Korea back to multilateral talks over its nuclear program.

Some of the sensitive topics that have dominated U.S.-Chinese talks in the past now seem further down the agenda.

China ritualistically complains about American support for Taiwan, for example. But now that China’s economic links with Taiwan are deepening, the two have established the first direct air links and tensions across the Taiwan Strait have eased considerably.

Likewise, Obama is under the microscope on whether he intends to take up the issue of human rights more directly than he has so far. Human-rights activists were alarmed when he did not meet with the Dalai Lama in Washington last month.

Obama gave a sense of how he intends to ever-so-delicately chide China on the question of more openness without being confrontational.

In a town-hall-style meeting in Shanghai with a group of students selected by the Chinese government, the president extolled the virtues of “freedoms of expression and worship, of access to information and political participation” that he said “we believe are universal rights.”

But Obama also was careful to say that the U.S. is not seeking to impose its system of government on any other country. When asked about China’s control of the Internet through a firewall that blocks access to certain popular websites such as Facebook and Twitter, Obama was measured, not criticizing his hosts directly.

“I’ve always been a strong supporter of open Internet use,” he said. “I’m a big supporter of noncensorship.”

Yet even that calibrated response appeared too much for China’s leaders, who censored the president’s remarks. No mention was made of the Shanghai town-hall forum on the country’s main national news broadcast Monday night, and news of Obama’s arrival in the country was relegated to less than a minute, in the seventh story slot.

The Shanghai meeting with students was the only chance for ordinary Chinese to get a glimpse of the new U.S. president and the only chance for Obama to meet with Chinese other than officials, even if they were members of the Communist Youth League in a tightly choreographed session.

But even these Chinese students, who largely followed the government line on policy, said Obama showed a human face and a spontaneity often lacking in their leaders.

Guo Ruijiea, a senior majoring in English at Tongji University, said Obama “doesn’t have big president airs. When he gave his speech on the stage, he was walking around like going for a walk with his caged birds. He gave me the impression that he is very amiable and easy to approach and close to people, and he cares a lot about the next generation.”