BEIJING, Aug 22 – US President Barack Obama will make his first presidential visit to China in November, in an effort to bring a new impetus to the key bilateral relation, America’s new ambassador to China said on Saturday.
"Much is happening in US-China relations… President Obama… is going to be visiting in the middle of November," Jon Huntsman told journalists after arriving in the Chinese capital late Friday.
"By the end of the year, after the president has been able to sit down with many of the good leaders here in China, I am hopeful, I am confident, that by the end of the year the US-China relationship will be stronger than ever before."
Earlier this month, the US Senate unanimously approved the former Republican governor of Utah — who is fluent in Mandarin and who once lived in Taiwan as a Mormon missionary — as Obama’s ambassador to China.
Speaking in both Chinese and English in the presence of his wife and his two adopted daughters from India and China, Huntsman, 49, called the US-China relationship "the most important in the world."
Besides the economic and trade relationship, the United States and China needed to focus on a series of other issues, including energy and climate, the global economy and regional security, he said.
"These are complex issues, they are not going to be resolved easily, but in order to get to where we all know we can be… it is going to take the United States and China working more diligently on them," Huntsman said.
"We all know from time to time we may disagree, but the world today, more than ever before, relies too much on a healthy and stable US-China relationship."
Huntsman, a former ambassador to Singapore who had been floated as a possible 2012 Republican challenger to Obama, also said he would seek to broaden the scope of America’s human rights dialogue with China.
"The human rights dialogue needs to be regularised and integrated into our broader discussions so that it isn’t just a once per year discussion but rather an ongoing dialogue that is meaningful and reflects our values as a country," he said.
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