Obama wraps up China visit

BEIJING — President Barack Obama wraps up a three-day visit to China Wednesday that has left him keenly aware of the limits of his administration's leverage over this economic powerhouse on issues from currency-exchange rates to human rights.

Obama has little leverage over China, in part because the U.S. depends on the Chinese to finance the U.S. government's growing debt, and because of the perception in China, which for years was an economic nonentity, that the U.S. is troubled and China is ascendant.

Administration officials said that the China stop, part of a four-nation Asia tour that will conclude Thursday in South Korea, was a success because it laid the groundwork for a more focused U.S.-China alliance to tackle everything from global warming to nuclear-weapons containment.

China gave no evident ground on the points at issue, however.

"The meetings and the focus from a substance standpoint really have been aimed at coordinating like never before on the key global issues that together are headline issues for the United States," said Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to China.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said: "I did not expect, and I can speak authoritatively for the president on this, that we thought the waters would part and everything would change."

Obama summed it up this way in a joint appearance Tuesday with President Hu Jintao: "The relationship between our two nations goes far beyond any single issue."

Hu and Obama announced potentially significant new agreements on advancing clean energy and scientific research. Both committed to work toward global-warming initiatives and reiterated a mutual desire to contain the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran.

In two areas in which the United States wants to shift China's positions — valuation of the Chinese currency and the Chinese government's censorship practices and human-rights abuses — no advances were announced, however.

The U.S. is the world's largest economy; China's the world's most populous nation, with the third-largest gross domestic product. China has helped keep the American economy afloat through the recession. Its huge trade surplus with the United States — and the $800 billion worth of American government debt that it holds — is economically unsustainable and leaves the U.S. dependent on Beijing's financial favor, however.

Obama has called for China to stop undervaluing its currency and adopt a more market-based standard as one way to begin reducing the trade imbalance.