Geithner then mentioned reading an old newspaper interview with Michel Camdessus, the head of the International Monetary Fund in the 1990s. Camdessus’s tenure included the Asian financial crisis and Mexican peso crisis, and some European leaders were unhappy about the extent to which the I.M.F. followed the advice of American policy makers, Geithner among them, in managing these crises. Geithner recalled that when the interviewer asked about this, Camdessus replied that America had influence disproportionate to its weight in the institution only when it had an idea others were willing to follow. The Camdessus strategy — make sure you have an idea worth following — will be the Treasury Department’s approach to China.

The strategy actually dates to the Bush administration and a series of meetings with Chinese leaders that Henry Paulson, Geithner’s predecessor, helped set up. If Obama’s advisers admire one aspect of President Bush’s economic policy — and coming up with another isn’t easy — it’s the effort to nurture a relationship with China. The meetings, which began in 2006, were called the Strategic Economic Dialogue. For the first sessions, Bernanke accompanied Paulson as a demonstration of respect to the Chinese and a sign of how seriously United States viewed the agenda. American and Chinese officials are now negotiating the logistical details of the next round of the dialogue, which will be jointly led by Geithner and Clinton. Internally, officials from State, Treasury and elsewhere in the administration have been jockeying for influence over China policy. But they all seem to agree that one of the main goals of the dialogue is to bring a wide variety of important Chinese officials — including those who represent industries and regions that have benefited from the imbalances — into the same room for the talks.

During the initial 2006 meetings, in a speech at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Bernanke laid out the essential parts of the argument that the Americans are likely to make this year. He began by ticking off what he called China’s “remarkable accomplishments”: the quintupling of per capita economic output, the lifting of 200 million people out of poverty and the like. But then, in the polite, technical manner of a central banker, he turned to its imbalances. He argued that by overinvesting in heavy industry, China had failed to grow as quickly as it could have (and to create more jobs for its people). It was devoting significantly more of its output to such investments than Japan or South Korea had during their respective rises in the 20th century, yet China was growing no faster than they had. That ran counter to economic theory and suggested, though Bernanke didn’t say so in these terms, that China was wasting resources. Rather than spreading the bounty of its boom and allowing households and businesses to find productive uses for it, China was spending so much on heavy industry and its export sector that it was necessarily propping up weak businesses. In 2006, this argument might have sounded like nit-picking. It doesn’t today.

There have recently been some signs that China has become more serious about dealing with its imbalances. For the first time since 2000, its trade surplus shrank, relative to G.D.P., last year. Late last year, China also cut taxes on fuel-efficient vehicles, which led to a surge in sales that helped Chinese consumers surpass American consumers, at least for now, as the world’s largest purchasers of vehicles. China’s economic planners also seem to have focused more in the last few years on highways and other infrastructure that would help households and sectors other than industrial ones. David Loevinger, the Treasury Department’s representative in Beijing, told me that when he visited the Great Wall recently, he drove on a highway that didn’t exist a year ago. And China has announced a plan to provide health insurance to hundreds of millions more people over the next three years. Jim O’Neill, the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, recently wrote that the health care expansion could prove to be “the most important development in the world economy.”

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Geithner, along with other administration officials, insists that he is cautiously optimistic about the path China is on. And that’s understandable. It’s not especially pleasant to think about what the global economy will look like if China and the United States fail to fix their dysfunctional relationship.

The frequent flares of social unrest in China could spread, and the government could decide that its short-term problems take precedence over its long-term ones. It might then try to stimulate its economy at the expense of everyone else — the beggar-thy-neighbor approach — by reversing the recent rise of the renminbi, lavishing new subsidies on exporters and restricting imports. In an otherwise optimistic article in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows, an American writer living in China, pointed out that the United States followed a similar protectionist strategy during the Great Depression. As a big exporter, it felt the need to help its struggling manufacturers. Other countries soon retaliated, and the depression deepened.

For China, such a strategy would resemble a doubling down. It would benefit the same parts of the economy — the industrial sectors, the coastal south, the wealthy — that have already done the best. Living standards for the rest of China would continue to grow more slowly than the pace of economic growth suggests they should.