But the recent disclosures about Chinese cyberattacks and the theft of industrial secrets, an operation managed partly from a Chinese People’s Liberation Army unit outside Shanghai, may affect the ability of Mr. Xi and Mr. Obama to forge anything the two men could claim to be a partnership. The new effort is similar to what Mr. Obama tried with Hu Jintao, Mr. Xi’s predecessor, which despite a promising start during the 2009 financial crisis quickly went sour. For the last three years, relations between the two countries have been dominated by disputes with China over its territorial claims and arguments over how to pressure North Korea and Iran.

Mr. Donilon, who has taken on the management of relations with China as a personal project, has begun to address the cyberattacks and intellectual property theft in public speeches, and he has made the argument that they must move to the center of the Sino-American relationship. He has steered clear of specific steps the United States was willing to take in response, and he has been more delicate about the subject than the Pentagon, which recently issued a blistering report that for the first time named the People’s Liberation Army as the source of much of the espionage against American companies and government facilities. In a sign of the diplomatic delicacy of the accusations, the White House would not say if it had reviewed the report; the Pentagon said it had been fully vetted.

The new report does propose specific remedies. One is to mandate that foreign companies that want to be listed on stock exchanges in the United States first pass a review by the Securities and Exchange Commission about whether they use stolen intellectual property. “They all want their shares to be traded here, so this would impose a real cost,” Mr. Blair said. Similarly, whether companies protect intellectual property would be considered by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which judges whether an investment in the United States could pose a security risk. Currently it looks only at national security implications of investments; this would add a new criterion.

But the commission also said that Congress should “greatly expand the number of green cards available to foreign students who earn science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees in American universities and who have a job offer” in the United States, to ensure that they have an incentive to stay in the United States rather than return home with knowledge they can use to compete with American companies. That recommendation would probably run headlong into the immigration debate in the United States.