File Photo: Chinese President Xi Jinping with US President Barack Obama (Reuters Photo)

© 2015, The New York Times News Service

For the past two years, the critical question confronting the Obama administration about Xi Jinping, the Chinese president who defied American predictions by challenging the United States' superpower status early and directly, has been how forcefully to respond.When Xi, barely a year in office, declared an exclusive "air defense identification zone" over a vast stretch of territory, the Obama administration immediately sent B-52s right through the space, and Vice President Joe Biden spent seven hours with the new Chinese leader, telling him, as one participant in the discussion recalled, "You will be seeing a lot more of this."But on a range of issues since then, from how directly to challenge China's territorial claims in the South China Sea to creating a cost for cyberespionage, the response has been less certain.This week's meeting between President Barack Obama and Xi is fraught with points of conflict, and its unspoken subtext is whether the president will confront the Chinese directly, deliberately causing friction in the relationship in hopes of drawing some lines around their behavior, or celebrate an unexpected partnership on issues like climate change and Iran, handling contentious issues in private.The administration has tried both approaches, and often come away frustrated and dissatisfied, according to senior officials, some of whom have left the government recently and spoke on the condition of anonymity.But Obama recognizes that what amounts to his third long meeting with Xi, a formal state visit full of ceremonial displays of respect and cooperation that begins here Thursday, is likely to be his last chance to start what one White House official calls "long-ball diplomacy with the Chinese."By the next major meeting between the two men, the official said, "Obama will have only months left in office."Musing on his dealings with China last week before an audience of business leaders, Obama noted that the Chinese are only episodically willing to take on the responsibilities that come with being a global power."In other areas," he said, "they still see themselves as the poor country that shouldn't have any obligations internationally."What is different about this meeting, however, is that Obama finally has some leverage - the tool that he once railed in a Situation Room meeting has often been missing with Beijing. A China weakened somewhat by economic downturn, and eager to calm the markets by showing it can manage its relationship with its most important trading partner and geopolitical rival, may be eager to avoid any open signs of rift - at least for a while.The most potent evidence of that came after Susan E. Rice, Obama's national security adviser, traveled to Beijing in late August to see Xi and try to plan out the trip. She warned that unless Xi acted on restraining what Rice in a speech on Monday called "cyber-enabled espionage that targets personal and corporate information for the economic gain of businesses" in China, Obama was prepared to impose sanctions, perhaps before Xi's arrival.The Chinese reaction was swift: Xi dispatched Meng Jianzhu, a close Communist Party adviser to Xi and head of state security, to make a highly unusual trip to Washington, along with some 50 aides, to work out a deal. On his return, he began speaking for the first time about the need to crack down on the theft of intellectual property - as opposed to espionage for national security - a distinction the Chinese never acknowledged before.Negotiations are also underway on embracing a set of rules, expected to be vague in their first iteration, that commit both countries to "no first use" of cyberweapons against each other's critical infrastructure in peacetime."They're not denying anymore that it's a problem," a senior official said. "We're not having a dialogue of the deaf anymore." The question is whether Xi is looking to pave over disputes, or solve them.The struggle to read China's leader is not new. When it became clear in 2011 that he was emerging as China's next president, Biden was dispatched to get to know him. They visited each other in elaborately choreographed trips in Beijing and Washington. But views of him varied.Thomas Donilon, Rice's predecessor, had been passing around a paper written by Dai Bingguo, the state councilor under Xi's predecessor, arguing against provoking the United States and its allies in the South China Sea and warning the Chinese military to bide its time. Others in the administration saw Xi as a dynamic reformer who would press for broader engagement with the United States while bringing the military under his control.But they missed the other side of Xi, "the risk taker," in the words of one of Obama's former top aides, "who is more nationalistic than we thought and more willing to be confrontational.""This is not the U.S.-China relationship that senior Obama officials expected," either at the start of Obama's tenure in 2009 or the beginning of Xi's in 2013, said Michael J. Green, an Asia specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who served at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. "The assumptions that many people had, that cooperation on transnational threats like climate change would ameliorate problems in geopolitical arenas, was wrong."Donilon, who played a key role in arranging the early relationship-building between Obama and Xi, said the Chinese president's recent moves had raised questions about his intentions and brought the administration to the point where it is ready to confront him."We are at a new phase in the relationship where China is acting much more aggressively," Donilon said. "President Obama is uniquely positioned to assert norms and establish rules of the road that make sense going forward, and to push back when those norms and rules of the road are being violated."In her speech on Monday, Rice made it clear the United States and China would showcase their cooperation on climate change, with a deal on carrying out a broad emissions accord they struck last year during a meeting in Beijing. There will also be agreement on a code of conduct to reduce the risk of accidents between U.S. and Chinese aircraft, and steps to expand educational exchanges between the two countries.But on the areas of sharpest disagreement, such as human rights, the South China Sea and cyberattacks, there is still a wide gulf - and for weeks the White House has been debating how to handle them.The South China Sea issue erupted last week in the Senate Armed Services Committee when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., pressed David Shear, the top Pentagon official in charge of Asia and the Pacific, to declare when the last time was that the United States sent ships or aircraft closer than 12 nautical miles to the newly reclaimed reefs.Twelve miles is the usual limit for "territorial waters," so the operation would show that the United States did not consider this to be Beijing's sovereign land. Reluctantly, Shear said the last time was in 2012, before Xi took office."The United States of America will sail, fly, and operate anywhere that international law permits," Rice said during her Monday speech, repeating the administration's policy on the matter.But one official said that Secretary of State John Kerry and his deputies, along with several intelligence officials, did not see the value in forcing the Chinese to react. Others disagree.Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said policymakers never anticipated this degree of trouble from Xi.Representatives of an array of those groups met with Rice at the White House on Tuesday to discuss concerns about China's proposed legislation to tighten controls on foreign nongovernmental organizations, and senior officials said the topic would be a focus of the meetings between the two presidents."Originally, there was reason for optimism about the speed of change in China" under Xi, said Cardin, one of a group of lawmakers set to meet with the Chinese president on Capitol Hill on Friday. "And now there's sort of disappointment."