Vice President Biden told Chinese officials in Beijing Thursday that the U.S.-Chinese relationship holds the key to a global economic resurgence.

Judging from several shoving matches between Chinese officials and the U.S. media -- and a vicious fight that ended a "friendship match" between the Georgetown Hoyas and a Chinese team -- that relationship may need some patching up.

"I hope this doesn't sound chauvanistic to other countries, but our mutual success will benefit the whole world," Biden told Wu Bangguo, chairman of the National People's Congress, at the start of a nine-day trip to China, Japan and Mongolia.

"As the two largest economies in the world, at the moment when the world economic circumstance is uneasy, I think we hold the key together to not only our own prosperity, but to generating growth and jobs worldwide," Biden said. "And that's the overwhelming reason I've come, to talk about jobs and growth."

Earlier, at a meeting with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, Biden said, "I'm absolutely confident that the economic stability of the world rests in no small part on the cooperation of the U.S. and China. ... It is the key, in my view, to global economic stability."

The meetings were the substantive part of a trip that has included several colorful moments for the veep, according to traveling White House press pooler Michael Memoli of the Tribune Washington bureau: