Summit to shape ties

Candor between Xi and Obama expected at two-day meeting

Sunnylands, a retreat in Southern California, is drawing a lot of attention ahead of an important summit between Chinese and US leaders as they look to develop their relations and discuss a wide range of strategic and economic challenges.

President Xi Jinping's plane landed Thursday night at Ontario International Airport, about 80 miles northwest of Sunnylands after his weeklong trip of three Latin American and Caribbean nations: Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and Mexico.

It will be the first meeting between leaders of the world's two largest economies since Xi became China's president in March and Obama started his second term in January.

The two leaders are scheduled to hold a meeting on Friday, followed by a private dinner. The talk will continue Saturday morning before it winds down at noon.

Sources have said that a meeting between the leaders had been discussed for some time. The earliest possible meeting would have been on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Russia in September and each side thought that was far too late.

A senior White House official said the smaller and informal format of the meeting would allow for more space for conversation and candor, adding that Xi's agreeing to an untested and unprecedented format for a meeting with an American president is "encouraging".

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and speechwriting, said the summit "would allow them to cover the broadest possible agenda and also to forge a working relationship that we will be relying on very much in the years to come."

The unnamed White House official emphasized that Obama invested a lot in getting to know Xi when he was invited to the US in February last year as China's vice-president. Xi toured Washington, Los Angeles and Muscatine, Iowa, where Xi visited in the mid-1980s as a county leader. Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew and Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey have all visited China in the past two months.

Both Chinese and US officials have stressed that the meeting will focus on building personal rapport and setting a tone for the bilateral relationship, rather than solving specific issues.

Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai said the meeting will enable US-China cooperation to create more solutions down the line.

Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society, said he feels hopeful that the practical attitude adopted by both Beijing and Washington in choosing to make Sunnylands the venue of the first presidential summit will help dissolve many of the impediments which have until now made it difficult to have closer relations.

Aside from a wide range of economic and security issues, the two leaders are expected to delve into the topic of building a new type of major power relationship put forward by Xi.

US leaders have welcomed the proposal and interpreted it as an effort to avoid the kind of rivalry between a rising power and an established power.

Xi also said China-US relations are at a critical juncture in his meeting with US National Security Advisor Tom Donilon in Beijing last week.

Jim Wunderman, who serves as the president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, said it is an encouraging sign that the two countries are looking to improve relations. "There are so many constructive things to do together and we think it is a new step that defiantly improves the engagement between China and the US," he said.

Having just returned from China as a member of the Nixon delegation to celebrate the 37th president's visit to China that "broke down the door of two great peoples", Werner Escher, head of international marketing for South Coast Plaza, said: "It is fitting that the meeting in California between the leaders of the world's two great powers so closely follows the Nixon visit".

He said the meeting in California reinforces what was started by Nixon, who at the time ended 25 years of bilateral silence.

Many analysts believe that despite the growing relationship and economic interdependency, the distrust between the two nations has deepened in recent years.

China remains suspicious of the true intentions of the US' pivot to Asia. It also feels its foreign direct investment in the US has been treated unfairly.

Many Americans, on the other hand, worry that a rising China is going to supplant the US' dominance in Asia and the world. Recent US allegations of the Chinese government's involvement in cyberattacks have further fueled public suspicion of China. China has denied the charges and said it is also a victim of vicious cyberhacks, many of which it claims originated from the US.

Ann Lee, an adjunct professor at New York University and author of the book What the US Can Learn from China, believes cybersecurity is being used as a smokescreen for more important discussions about geopolitical issues.

A recent Reuters report shows that the US has been the largest buyer and beneficiary of hacking information.

China and US will hold their annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington next month.

Chen Jia and Wang Jun in Los Angeles contribute to this story.