New areas of consensus expected from US-China summit: White House official

The upcoming summit between US and Chinese presidents in Beijing offers an opportunity for them to have substantive discussions on an array of issues with new areas of consensus expected to further bilateral ties, the White House's top official on Asian affairs said Friday. [Special coverage]

Evan Medeiros, senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, said the summit comes at an "important" time as it provides Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping with an opportunity to have "substantive, candid and in-depth discussions" about a whole range of global, regional and bilateral issues important to US-China relations.

Obama will be in Beijing Monday through Wednesday for an economic leaders' meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and for a state visit to China. Obama will have both formal and informal talks with Xi.

"We see this trip as an important opportunity to define a forward-looking agenda for the U.S.-China relationship over the next two years, and to ensure that U.S.-China relationship is defined for the most part by more and better and higher-quality cooperation on regional and global challenges, for also carefully managing the disagreements between the two countries," Medeiros told reporters at the Foreign Press Center in Washington.

He said he expected Obama to outline at the conclusion of his visit "some very important new areas of consensus that will help take the US-China relationship to a new level."

He drew attention to the fact that Obama has met with the Chinese leader more times than any other president in the history of bilateral relationship.

"That's because we made a strategic decision early on that it's important for the two leaders to meet very regularly to set the tone and to be the drivers of cooperation in the US-China relationship," explained Medeiros.

The last time they met in June last year at the Annenberg Retreat in California, Obama and Xi agreed to forge a new type of major-country relationship between their countries.

"We want a creative relationship between the United States and China, in which strategic rivalry is not unavoidable," Medeiros said. "In other words, it is not unavoidable that a rising power and an established power are destined for major-power conflict, that's the core concept behind the new-model idea."

"The question is how do you build that kind of relationship. ... And our view has been ... about expanding the areas of cooperation while carefully managing our differences and areas of competition," said Medeiros.