November 15 - 18, 2009 — President Obama made his first official visit to China. During the visit, President Obama and PRC President Hu Jintao released a Joint Statement on U.S. and PRC interests in the 21 st century. October 5, 2009 —The Dalai Lama arrived in Washington as part of a U.S. visit which will not include a meeting with President Barack Obama. According to the White House, a meeting with the Dalai Lama will be postponed until after the President's November trip to China to meet with PRC President Hu Jintao. October 4, 2009 —PRC Premier Wen Jiabao began a three-day, high-profile "goodwill" visit to North Korea. October 1, 2009 —The PRC celebrated the 60 th anniversary of its founding, with celebrations including a massive military parade showcasing the latest military technology. September 26, 2009 —Beijing announced it would ease restrictions on foreign investments in the culture industry, to include film, publishing, entertainment, online games, and multi-media. The Administration of President Barack Obama has inherited from the George W. Bush Administration a relationship with China that is smoother than in the past, but also has grown significantly more complex, multifaceted, and intertwined. During the Bush Administration, Washington and Beijing cultivated regular high-level visits and exchanges of working level officials, resumed military-to-military relations, cooperated on anti-terror initiatives, and worked closely on the Six Party Talks to restrain and eliminate North Korea's nuclear weapons activities. These and other initiatives of engagement are likely to continue in some fashion under the Obama Administration. In addition, the Obama Administration has indicated that it would like to forge greater cooperation with China on the international financial crisis, global climate change, and a range of security interests. These issues were the points of focus during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first official trip to China in February 2009. Despite these new avenues of cooperation, ongoing bilateral issues provide a constant set of challenges for U.S. policymakers. They include difficulties over the status and well-being of Taiwan, ongoing disputes over China's failure to protect U.S. intellectual property rights, China's economic and trade policies, and growing concerns about the quality and safety of exported PRC products. The PRC's more assertive foreign policy and continued military development also have significant long-term implications for U.S. global power and influence and have been of concern to U.S. policymakers. Some U.S. lawmakers have suggested that U.S. policies toward the PRC perhaps should be reassessed in light of these trends. Many U.S. observers have become increasingly concerned about China's growing economic and political reach in the world, often referred to as "China's rise," and what it means for global U.S. economic and political interests. Some in this debate believe China's growing global power and influence is a malign threat that needs to be thwarted; others believe that it is an inevitable phenomenon that needs to be guided and managed. Complicating this debate are the effects of globalization, which have bound together U.S. and PRC interests much more closely than in the 1990s. These extensive inter-linkages make it increasingly difficult for either government to take unilateral actions without inviting far-reaching, unintended consequences that could adversely affect other policy interests. Like the 110 th Congress before it, the 111 th Congress is facing recurring issues involving this debate and what policies and approaches may best serve and protect a broad range of U.S. interests. This policy debate is animated by continuing uncertainty over how China ultimately may choose to wield its rising capabilities. According to one school of thought, China's economic and political rise in the world is inevitable and needs to be accommodated and managed. In this view, as China becomes more economically interdependent with the international community, it will have a greater stake in pursuing stable international economic relationships. China has a vested interest, for instance, in cooperating on ways to address the global economic crisis by helping to craft a new international financial system. Growing wealth in the PRC also is likely to encourage Chinese society to move in directions that will develop a materially better-off, more educated, and cosmopolitan populace. Such a populace, according to this view, is likely to be more conservative and more desirous of avoiding conflict with the United States. Already, say such proponents, these developments have led China's population to press its government for greater political pluralism, transparency, and inclusiveness—key U.S. objectives—and this trend is likely to continue as China's capabilities grow. From this perspective, U.S. policy should seek to work more closely with the PRC, not only to encourage these positive long-term trends, but to seek ways to mutually benefit by cooperating on important global issues such as the international financial system, alternative energy sources, climate change, and medical research. Ultimately, some proponents of this view say, the United States simply will have to make room for the economic and political appetites of the superpower that China is likely to become. Viewing the PRC as a "threat" or attempting to contain it, these proponents say, could produce disastrous policy consequences. In addition to possible military conflict with the PRC, these consequences could include the possible creation of greater Chinese nationalism with a strong anti-American bias, a breakdown in PRC governance, the bolstering of party power and subsequent retrenchment of reforms, and/or an increasingly isolated United States that the international community may see as out of step with global trends. Other proponents of the "inevitability" of China's rise especially stress the extreme competitive challenges of China's growing power. They say these challenges, even if benign, pose potentially huge consequences for U.S. global interests. Beijing officials, say this group, view the world as a state-centered, competitive environment where power is respected, and are determined to use the means at their disposal to increase their nation's wealth, power, and influence in a largely opportunistic fashion. A militarily muscular China with substantial international economic ties will be able to exercise considerable political power that could prompt U.S. friends and allies to make different choices, eroding U.S. influence around the world. These observers charge that the PRC already is exploiting the international financial crisis to strengthen its access to international energy sources and other commodities. The United States, they argue, should develop a comprehensive strategic plan in order to counter China's growing power by strengthening its existing regional alliances and making new ones, expanding overseas investments, sharpening American global competitiveness, and maintaining a robust military presence in Asia and elsewhere as a counterweight to growing PRC power and influence. Others in the American policy debate see malign factors at work in China's growing power. PRC leaders, they argue, may be portraying their growth as a "peaceful rise" with no harmful consequences, but actually they are biding their time, simply conforming to many international norms as a strategy while China is still weak. In reality, these proponents say, Beijing seeks at least to erode and at best to supplant U.S. international power and influence. In conducting their international relations, they maintain, Chinese leaders seek to cause rifts in U.S. alliances, create economic interdependence with U.S. friends, and arm U.S. enemies. Despite the statements of support for the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign, according to this view, the PRC's repeated violations of its non-proliferation commitments actually have contributed to strengthening nations that harbor global terrorists. Furthermore, they maintain that the PRC under its current authoritarian form of government is inherently a threat to U.S. interests, and that the PRC political system needs to change dramatically before the United States has any real hope of reaching a constructive relationship with it. From this perspective, U.S. policy should focus on mechanisms to change the PRC from within while remaining vigilant and attempting to contain PRC foreign policy actions and economic relationships around the world where these threaten U.S. interests. With this broad array of difficult and challenging policy choices in mind, U.S.-China relations today are defined by a comprehensive list of bilateral and multilateral issues. Some of these remain key irritants in the relationship, while others are rooted in significant inter-dependence and mutual benefit. Likewise, some are characterized by vigorous competition, while others are founded on bilateral and multilateral cooperation. President Barack Obama made his first official state visit to China on November 15-18, 2009. The visit resulted in a U.S.-China Joint Statement discussing the importance of the relationship, highlighting its key accomplishments, and enumerating in what areas the two sides seek further cooperation. These last areas included cooperation on increased educational exchanges; global economic recovery; and climate change, energy, and the environment. U.S. officials described the President's discussions in China as having achieved progress on many issues, and some officials appeared frustrated that the visit did not receive more uniformly positive press coverage. Some human rights activists and Chinese dissidents expressed disappointment that the visit had not met their expectations. They criticized the discussion agenda, for instance, for focusing on economic and financial issues and by-passing human rights issues, Iran's nuclear program, and progress on North Korea. According to one news account, several dissidents in China said they had been detained by police after seeking a meeting with President Obama in Beijing. According to another press account, President Obama did raise human rights issues in his discussions, in particular the case of American geologist Xue Feng who had been detained several years earlier, charged with stealing state secrets, for signing a contract to purchase a commercial geological database.