Report: China has high hopes on Hu visit

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- Foreign policy analysts said Chinese President Hu Jintao's U.S. visit gives the United States and China an opportunity to put relations on a positive footing.

Hu arrived in Washington Tuesday for a summit with President Barack Obama. On Monday, the two sides concluded commercial deals valued at more than half a billion dollars.

"The visit is a good opportunity, not just for the leaders to get together but for people in China and the U.S. to feel that this is an important relationship. It has a public aspect," Douglas Spelman at the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States told China Daily.

University of California-San Diego Professor Susan Shirk was quoted as saying the visit would be important for the two sides to "get back on a positive track," adding she saw "some encouraging signs on the Chinese side that that's what they want to do."

China Daily said the U.S. media have given the visit heavy coverage, and quoted an article in The New York Times by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, saying the Hu visit is "the most important top-level U.S.-China encounter since Deng Xiaoping's historic trip more than 30 years ago."

Nicholas Platt, president emeritus of the Asia Society, told China Daily, "We should also look below the surface to what Chinese and Americans are actually doing together before making a judgment of whether we have trust or not."