Andy Wong/Associated Press

Of all the White House visitors in from China on Wednesday, one may be having a particularly awkward day: Jon Huntsman.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, President Obama joked about reports that Mr. Huntsman, his ambassador to China, is contemplating a run for president in 2012.

“I’m sure the fact that him having worked so well with me will be a great asset in any Republican primary,” Mr. Obama said, with a wry smile at the press conference with visiting President Hu Jintao of China.

Mr. Huntsman is in Washington to help shepherd Mr. Hu through his first official state visit with Mr. Obama.

A State Department spokesman confirmed in an e-mail that Mr. Huntsman “is here and will be a full participant during today’s activities.”

But the visit comes just weeks after Mr. Huntsman, the charismatic former Republican governor of Utah, appeared to indicate in an interview that he might be interested in challenging his boss — Mr. Obama — in the 2012 presidential election.

“You know, I’m really focused on what we’re doing in our current position,” he told Newsweek this month. “But we won’t do this forever, and I think we may have one final run left in our bones.” Asked by the Newsweek reporter whether he was ruling out a challenge to Mr. Obama in 2012, Mr. Huntsman declined to comment.

The prospect that Mr. Huntsman might run for president still seems somewhat remote. His remarks to Newsweek were vague enough that they could be interpreted any number of ways. And there are plenty of reasons why Mr. Huntsman might decide that 2012 is not the right year to seek higher office.

And yet there are no doubt that some people inside the White House — the president included — wouldn’t mind a bit of face time with the man they recruited to join the administration. (There’s not an official woodshed in the White House, but the Oval Office can surely feel like one at times.)

Mr. Obama praised Mr. Huntsman’s performance as ambassador, saying he has done an “outstanding” job in the past two years.

“He is a Mandarin speaker,” Mr. Obama said. “He has brought enormous skill, dedication and talent to the job and you know the fact that he comes from a different party I think is a strength, not a weakness, because it indicates the degree to which both he and I believe that partisanship ends at the water’s edge and that we work together to advocate on behalf of our country.”

When the White House sent Mr. Huntsman to China, it seemed like a master political stroke, a way of taking a potential rival out of contention by bringing him into the fold — and sending him halfway around the world. Chris Cillizza, who writes The Fix politics blog at The Washington Post, wrote at the time that the move “almost certainly forecloses the possibility that he will be a candidate for national office in 2012.”

Now the president’s political advisers have to consider the possibility that Mr. Huntsman could try to use his employment as an ambassador for the president to his advantage, casting himself as a candidate with great appeal to independent voters looking for evidence that the two parties in Washington can work together to solve problems.

That would infuriate Mr. Obama’s team, which has long seen Mr. Huntsman as a potent danger to the president’s re-election. David Plouffe, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers, spoke admiringly of Mr. Huntsman’s political skills in May 2009, saying, “I think he’s really out there and speaking a lot of truth about the direction of the party.”

The visit of President Hu is filled with ceremony and substance that will no doubt distract Mr. Obama and his top aides from dwelling on Mr. Huntsman’s comments or his possible challenge in 2012.

But there are likely to be more than a few moments in the course of the day when Mr. Huntsman will find himself, awkwardly, standing at a reception or sitting at the state dinner across the table from Mr. Obama, Mr. Plouffe or one of the president’s other senior advisers.

An admirer of the former governor said Wednesday that Mr. Huntsman would not be measuring the drapes in the White House during his visit there Wednesday.

“But,” he joked morbidly, “maybe finding a food taster.”