Oren Dorell, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — When President Obama welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping to the White House this week, the two leaders will find common ground in their efforts to combat global warming and restrain Iran's nuclear program . But other flash points between the two world powers remain.
Here are the top four Obama and Xi likely will confront in their talks:
The U.S. and China both want to talk about security in cyberspace, but that has a different meaning in each country. In the United States it means stopping Chinese hacking attacks such as the theft of personal information of more than 21 million Americans from the Office of Personnel Management , revealed last spring.
China, which denies responsibility for that hack, thinks of cyber security as protecting cyber infrastructure.
“The Chinese are worried about an open Internet and want to control information,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies .
Obama also has complained about cyber-related theft of commercial trade secrets by China. The U.S. makes a distinction between industrial espionage, which goes against international business norms, and national security espionage focused on state secrets, which all countries engage in. Chinese officials, who are focused on growing into a great power, “don’t buy the distinction,” Glaser said.
The economy
Obama and Xi lead the world’s two largest economies and want more access to each other’s markets. And China wants the United States to show confidence in China’s economy , which has been shaken by slowing growth, a stock market crash this summer and a currency devaluation.
Xi, whose government has taken extraordinary measures to stem the stock market crash, is keen to go home with good news from Washington, said Minxin Pei, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund of the United States . “He needs all the good news he can get,” Pei said.
Xi would like a U.S. commitment to include China’s currency among the International Monetary Fund 's reserve currencies, which would be a major sign of confidence in China’s economy, Pei said. The United States wants such a step to include a Chinese commitment to greater transparency of its economy, said Andrew Smalls, another analyst at the German Marshall Fund.
Both countries also are working on a bilateral investment agreement, but they’ve yet to agree on the number of sectors that will be off limits to each other’s investors, known as a “negatives list.”
“The United States wants a negatives list as short as possible," Glaser said. “China wants a much longer negative list. It remains to be seen whether that really is doable.”
China has alarmed the United States and its Asian allies with an aggressive island building and fortification program in the South China Sea. The U.S. says the islands and the military infrastructure China is putting on them threaten navigation rights for commercial and U.S. warships. China says the islands are legal, that no commercial traffic has been impacted and that the issue concerns it and its neighbors, not the United States. The two nations’ warships and aircraft have already had some close encounters in the region.
The question facing Obama is how to react without risking an escalation, Pei said. “If China takes more islands (and maritime territory) what will you do?”
Human rights
Xi is coming to Washington seeking “a new type of great power relations” with the United States that focuses on the countries’ common interests and acknowledges the need to “manage and control differences," according to the official state-run Xinhua news agency . The goal is to avoid “strategic miscalculation,” it said.
To China, such language means U.S. recognition of China’s primacy in east Asia, its approach to human rights and one-party rule in China, Pei said.
The White House is unlikely to sign on to such language. U.S. officials “speak openly about persistent human rights violations, pressing our concerns at every level,” Susan Rice , Obama’s national security adviser, said in a speech at George Washington University on Monday.
China’s increasing restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly — including visa restrictions on American journalists — “hollow-out China’s potential,” Rice said. And a Chinese law under consideration that would tighten regulation of foreign human rights groups would threaten “the very organizations that have promoted China’s development and advanced the friendship between our peoples,” she said.
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