Obama wraps up China trip

BEIJING – US President Barack Obama wrapped up his first trip to China yesterday by meeting Premier Wen Jiabao, who said the two nations were better off as partners not rivals, and visiting the Great Wall.

The US president left Beijing for South Korea, where he was due to meet President Lee Myung-Bak today for talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme and a stalled bilateral free trade pact.Obama and Wen hailed their countries’ willingness to build a new, in-depth partnership as they sat down for discussions and a working lunch in Beijing, echoing comments made on Tuesday by the US leader and Chinese President Hu Jintao.’Dialogue is better than confrontation and partnership is better than rivalry,’ Wen said in his opening remarks.Obama noted the Sino-US relationship was ‘now expanding to deal with a whole host of global issues in which US-China co-operation is critical’.They also broached the thorny issue of trade, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency, following tensions over accusations of dumping and other unfair trade practices made between the two countries. Wen called on the United States to ‘lift its policy of restricting exports of high-tech products to China,’ and Obama responded that his country was willing to address the issue, Xinhua said.The US president – who was accompanied by his secretaries of state, commerce and energy and the country’s trade representative – and Wen also denounced protectionism, the report said.Obama had been expected to raise other economic issues such as the yuan, which Washington sees as undervalued. Related article: Obama raises rights, impact uncertain.According to Xinhua, Wen and Obama also touched on climate change, the Middle East, the Doha round of trade talks, as well as North Korea.Wen last month made a rare visit to the reclusive state, where he was told by leader Kim Jong-Il that Pyongyang was willing to return to nuclear disarmament talks.Officials from both sides did not immediately comment on the specifics of the meeting.Obama held the bulk of his formal talks on Tuesday with Hu, after which the leaders of the world’s number one and three economies said they had agreed to pool their global clout to attack a number of tough issues.The pair vowed to push for a climate change deal, called on North Korea to return to multilateral talks on ending its nuclear weapons programme and emphasised the need to resurrect the global economy from the depths of crisis.But few concrete agreements emerged from the talks and differences were obvious in the two leaders’ statements on Iran, economic issues and Tibet – an extremely sensitive subject for China.Yet Obama on Tuesday said Sino-US ties have ‘never been more important to our collective future’, adding that the world was facing immense challenges that ‘neither of our nations can solve by acting alone’.Both he and Hu spoke about building a ‘positive, co-operative, and comprehensive’ relationship – using the exact same phrase. Obama has invited Hu to visit the United States in 2010, and Hu has accepted.Aides to the US president – whose visit to China was the third and longest leg of his Asia tour, following stops in Japan and Singapore – have stressed that he is working on a relationship that will be invaluable for the future. – Nampa-AFP