Obama brings broad agenda to meeting with China's Hu
BEIJING -- President Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, met officially for more than an hour Tuesday at China's Great Hall of the People, and the U.S. president 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 the countries' respective currencies.
The two leaders were also trying to find agreement on some modest climate-change goals for the upcoming environmental summit in Copenhagen and on edging North Korea back to multilateral talks over its nuclear program.
"I'm very happy to have talks with you," Hu told Obama at the start of the meeting. "You have worked actively to promote this relationship."
Obama replied, "We believe strong dialogue is important not only for the U.S. and China, but for the rest of the world."
The two already met once over dinner Monday night, shortly after Obama arrived in the frigid Chinese capital from Shanghai. National security adviser James L. Jones described that meeting between as an "informal dinner discussion" in which the two leaders discussed "the evolution and histories of China and the United States."
Jones said the two also spoke at length about education, but he did not elaborate.
Reflecting the broad range of issues that have come to characterize relations between the two countries, 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 own economic links with Taiwan are deepening under the island's Nationalist government, 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, and when Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to play down the issue of human rights during her first official visit to Beijing as secretary of state eight months ago.
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 was also careful to say that the United States is not seeking to impose its system of government on any other country. And he went to some lengths to assure the audience that the United States welcomes China's rise as a new power and has no interest in trying to contain it.
When asked about China's control of the Internet through a "firewall" that blocks access to certain popular Web sites 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 non-censorship."
Source: Washington Post
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