in-waiting Xi Jinping won the kind of reception in the United States that suggests Washington sees his rise as a chance to narrow economic and political rifts. Converting the warm mood music brought by Xi into substantively improved Sino-US ties, however, will demand concessions that both sides are likely to resist. Vice President Xi is virtually sure to succeed Hu Jintao as China's president in just over a year, and the mix of flattering attention and impatient demands that greeted Xi in the United States showed the Obama administration wants to make sure he enters the top job with a firm grasp of what Washington wants. “China is no different from other countries in the sense that when you have the same leader hanging on, it's more difficult to change established policy, but China now has a situation where you can make adjustments in policy because of a pattern of regular turn-over,” said J. Stapleton Roy, who was the US ambassador in Beijing from 1991 to 1995. “It does not necessarily make a big difference, but every time you change a leader, you have greater potential for change of policies,” said Roy, who directs the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden appear to nurse some hopes that Xi's ascendance could bring greater Chinese accommodation. They spent plenty of time getting to know him, and he received a high-level reception at the Pentagon. In turn, Xi (pronounced like “shee”) put a folksy smile on China's usually grim-faced officialdom by returning to Muscatine, a town in Iowa he visited as a young cadre in 1985. Xi also played on US hopes for more trade and investment, a message he will also take to his final US stop, Los Angeles, on Friday. “From the US point of view, a change in (Chinese) leaders is a natural opportunity to reset ties,” said Robert Kuhn, an American biographer of Chinese leaders who has also advised them and has met Xi. “Xi appears comfortable in his own skin and less worried about deviating from some script,” said Kuhn. But despite the shows of bonhomie and China's effusive media coverage, Xi's visit was punctuated by flashes of the tensions that weighed on ties during President Hu's time, and are likely to persist whoever succeeds Hu or wins the November US presidential election. Obama, Biden and senior members of the US Congress plied Xi with demands that Beijing do more to balance trade, help the United States deal with global troublespots, and relax its heavy grip on dissidents and restive Tibet. __
