The US president is expected to address hacking concerns, particularly the OPM breach, when he meets with Chinese president Xi Jinping on Thursday

The Obama administration reiterated that financial sanctions against China were “on the table” over alleged cyber-attacks on Thursday as President Xi Jinping of China arrived in Washington for the first time.

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Obama, who will dine with Xi on Thursday night, is expected to address hacking concerns, notably the disastrous breach of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which exposed the personal information (including psychiatric evaluations and background checks) of some 21.5 million current, former and prospective federal workers.



In answer to a question about Chinese hacking at Thursday’s White House press briefing, the presidential press secretary, Josh Earnest, said Obama was prepared to respond to large-scale cybercrime with economic punishment. “I will just say that we have made clear our concerns about China’s activity in cyberspace,” Earnest said. “There are a range of tools that are at the president’s disposal to respond to those concerns. We do believe that having those tools on the table, including possible financial sanctions, have been effective as a deterrent and in advancing our interest in that regard.”

Chinese hacking and corporate espionage, both the apparently state-sponsored variety and individual, has made for an awkward series of meetings with Xi in Silicon Valley. Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos and other leaders of the American tech sector have met Xi, but it is unclear what effects the meetings will have.

Microsoft’s Nadella played host to Xi on the tech company’s campus yesterday, where Xi posed for a photo op with that company’s CEO, Cook, Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba’s Jack Ma and a host of others. Notably absent from the picture is Sundar Pichai, newly appointed CEO of Google, which is blocked in China over its refusal to censor search.

Nadella eschewed controversy in a statement to the Guardian. “It was an honor to host President Xi Jinping and first lady Peng Liyuan at Microsoft, and to have the opportunity to discuss our vision for how technology can help advance health, education and business around the world,” he wrote.

Dean Garfield, president and CEO of tech business lobbying group and thinktank the Information Technology Industry Council, opened his address to the US-China Internet Industry Forum (where Xi was in attendance) in Silicon Valley on Wednesday thus: “We live in a world where the list of societal challenges is long, and getting longer, but where the collective collaboration between the United States and China is just, say, suboptimal.”

Earnest said further that talk from Chinese officials on this subject was cheap. “I think we will pay particular attention to China’s behavior and their conduct,” he told the press corps. “Their actions are more important than their words.”