WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao will meet in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday in a state visit meant to reset relations after a rocky year. While dozens of major global issues will be on the table, one thing will be missing: trust.
Locked in a multitrillion-dollar embrace of trade and debt, the leaders of the world’s two largest economies will work together where they can. But mutual suspicion and political realities mean that Obama and Hu are unlikely to announce major breakthroughs on sensitive issues such as currency reform or human rights.
“Overall, you’ve got a lack of trust, mutual trust,” said Drew Thompson, director of China studies at the Washington-based Nixon Center, a foreign-policy research center.
The Obama administration will use the White House meetings with Hu to prod China to let its currency, the yuan, float freely, making American exports more competitive; to help rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions; and to strengthen military-to-military ties, U.S. officials and private experts said.
American leverage is limited, however: China holds nearly $1 trillion in U.S. government debt.
Hu, whose term expires in 2012, apparently is hoping to burnish his legacy, improve China’s image in the United States — he also will travel to Chicago — and push for wider Chinese investment here. China lobbied for the official state visit, with all its pomp, for Hu. It is the first for a Chinese leader since 1997.
The 14 months since Obama last visited China have been a roller coaster for Sino-American relations.
China suspended military exchanges last January to protest new U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province. Then China began pressing maritime and territorial claims in East Asia.
Washington pushed back. U.S. officials felt, until recently, that China had failed to dissuade North Korea from provocative actions, such as last year’s sinking of a South Korean warship and shelling of Yeonpyeong island.
