At informal Obama-Xi summit, White House hopes for a connection

WASHINGTON — Two years ago, President Obama hosted China’s president, Hu Jintao, in a fastidiously choreographed White House summit involving an honor guard, a state dinner and a 21-gun salute. In meetings, officials spent more time reading from scripts than discussing touchy topics of mutual concern.

The ceremonial trappings will be gone when Obama hosts China’s new president, Xi Jinping, at a “shirt-sleeves” summit Friday and Saturday at Sunnylands, a 200-acre desert retreat in Rancho Mirage with a pedigree so laid back that it flanks a golf course at the intersection of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope drives.

The White House proposed the informal summit in hopes the two leaders can establish a personal rapport early in Xi’s tenure and discuss — without the pageantry of a state visit — the toughest issues between them, particularly North Korea’s nuclear program, cyber attacks from China and territorial disputes in Asian waters.

“Getting to a venue like Sunnylands allows for a more informal set of discussions than we’ve had with China to date in the sense that it’s a less scripted, less formal, less rigid agenda,” a White House official said Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity in briefing reporters. “So it’s not just dealing with the irritant of the day, but also stepping back and getting more of a blue-sky sense of where the United States and China stand on these issues.”

White House officials initially were reluctant to stage the meeting because Obama and Xi are scheduled to meet this year at a Group of 20 meeting and an Asian economic summit. But Xi has rapidly asserted his authority at home and abroad, and the White House faced increasing pressure from business leaders and others anxious about China’s growing economic and military clout.

U.S. officials say Beijing had requested the meeting almost since Xi declared a more engaged global role for China as one of the “great powers” last winter. After Xi assumed the presidency in March, he visited Russia and Africa on his first overseas trip and dispatched China’s premier to India and Pakistan, as well as Europe, further signs of China’s new ambitions on the world stage.

“It’s clearly designed to telegraph to the United States, ‘Look, we’re going to be playing our own diplomatic game,’” said Christopher Johnson, a former CIA specialist on China who now is a senior advisor at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The message there is, ‘We want a good relationship with the U.S., but we can do a lot in the world without you if you want to do it that way.’”

With Xi already planning official visits this week to Trinidad and Tobago, plus Costa Rica and Mexico, Obama extended a last-minute invitation in April to stop on the West Coast before Xi flies home.

That left little time for a formal summit. The White House isn’t even sure the two leaders will issue a joint statement, as is customary after a summit, let alone any “deliverables,” or major policy announcements usually so important in such high-level visits.

During the visit, Obama hopes to sit down with Xi in at least one meeting with just two or three aides. The relaxed format is likely to give each leader an opportunity to “develop a serious sense of the other,” as Kenneth Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution expert on China, put it.

“If it goes well, each will at the conclusion effectively say to himself, ‘I get that guy.... I think I can do business with him,’” said Lieberthal, formerly a senior official on Asia policy in the Clinton administration. “Of course, there is a possibility that one or both will conclude that he cannot really ‘read’ or trust the other, in which case the future relationship will also reflect that reality.”

Past meetings with Chinese leaders have included what one administration official referred to as “bleachers full” of aides. Sometimes it seemed that Hu, the last Chinese president, was speaking more to his own delegation than to the Americans present.

Xi lived with a family in rural Muscatine, Iowa, for several weeks in 1985 on an agricultural tour and is seen as far more worldly than his predecessor. Though not fluent in English, he and an interpreter spent many hours with the loquacious Vice President Joe Biden when Biden visited China in 2011, when Xi was vice president.

Biden, in turn, took Xi to a Lakers game when Xi visited the West Coast last year. The two also spent hours discussing North Korea, trade and human rights.

After those visits, and others by senior administration officials, White House officials concluded that Obama might develop a working relationship with Xi once he became president.

“He’s a different kind of Chinese leader than we’ve seen in the past,” said Jeffrey Bader, a senior Brookings fellow who served as a top White House advisor on China in Obama’s first term. “He is someone who is clearly comfortable with give-and-take, with informality. He’s not someone who needs to be scripted or likes to be scripted as much as past Chinese leaders.”

Analysts say Xi’s willingness to accept unrehearsed talks with Obama reflects a desire to break from the past. Xi also seeks to present an image back home that he is on equal footing with the U.S. president.

“Hu Jintao [was] very weak, but Xi Jinping seems very strong,” said Mao Yushi, a prominent economist in Beijing, noting how Xi has moved quickly to strengthen control of the Communist Party — something that Mao sees as deleterious for Chinese society and its citizens’ freedom.

Chinese academics say a key priority for Xi is to develop a “new-type great-power relationship” with the U.S. Although it isn’t clear what that would look like, Chinese scholars regard the interaction between the world’s dominant power and the rising power as the starting point.

“China-U.S. relations have come to a delicate stage, as theirs is a relationship between the No. 1 and No. 2 or between the leader of the existing international order and the potential successor to the leadership of the order,” Jin Canrong, a professor of international studies at People’s University in Beijing, wrote recently in offering a perspective on the summit.

“History tells us that such a relationship has never been easy,” he said, citing the tension between Britain and an ascendant Germany before World War I. “To develop a new-type-model great-power relationship, China and the United States must first and foremost have strategic mutual trust.”

In some ways, the two nations are closer than ever, with unprecedented flows of commerce, technologies, students and tourists.

Bilateral trade has more than tripled over the last decade, exceeding $535 billion last year. But many Americans bemoan the persistently large U.S. deficit that they deem at least partly the result of unfair trade practices by China, with its state subsidies for industries and theft of intellectual property.

Beijing, for its part, has accused Washington of meddling in China’s internal affairs. And many Chinese remain suspicious of Obama’s so-called pivot-to-Asia security strategy as an effort to contain China.

But Obama and Xi appear to have common ground in dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program. Beijing has expressed increasing impatience with Pyongyang’s unpredictable behavior.

The two sides also have agreed to establish a working group on cyber security, although it’s unclear whether the Chinese will involve military and other key personnel in the talks to address Washington’s increasing complaints of Chinese hacking of American corporate and government computers.

Even with the unusual setting and the new face of Chinese leadership in Xi, analysts don’t see any dramatic change, or “reset,” in the relationship any time soon.

“I think there will be a lot of continuity,” said Nicholas Lardy, a China expert at the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

christi.parsons@latimes.com

don.lee@latimes.com