US media expects Xi's visit to boost trade ties amid economic slowdown

BEIJING -- Chinese President Xi Jinping is due to arrive in the United States Tuesday for an official visit, where he will be welcomed with a 21-gun salute on the White House lawn and a state dinner.

The visit, including meetings in Seattle with American business executives and a speech before the UN in New York, has become a media sensation in the United States.

The headlines, highlighting trade ties between the world's two largest economies, expected the visit to unleash development opportunities for both sides in time of economic slowdown.

The Quartz, a business news publication based in New York, said Xi will spend a jam-packed 36 hours talking tech in Seattle, the fist stop of his visit to the United States, including a roundtable meeting with some of China's most powerful CEOs and their US counterparts.

"Conspicuously missing from both Chinese and US lists are executives from the biggest companies in both countries: Sinopec, China National Petroleum, Walmart, and Exxon. During Xi's visit to Europe last March, he was accompanied by over 200 Chinese business leaders, many from the energy sector," its website noted.

Tech companies at the meeting will inevitably talk about cyber security, but they, and companies in other sectors, will also get broad space for cooperation.

Several days before Xi landed in the United States, Los Angeles Times, in a report titled "For China's Xi Jinping, strong trade ties ensure a warm welcome in Seattle," noted that Xi was the fourth consecutive Chinese leader to visit Seattle, a record that elected officials in the state boasted about.

He was also the fourth to call on Boeing, underscoring a relationship that began when then-President Nixon arrived in Beijing in 1972 on Air Force One, a Boeing 707, the newspaper added.

China is the aerospace giant's largest international market, the company said, and so far in 2015, Chinese customers have taken delivery of a quarter of Boeing's commercial airline production.

"Over the next 20 years, China will be Boeing's largest commercial airplane market with a projected need for 6,330 new airplanes, worth an estimated $950 billion," the company said in a statement.

Testifying to the significance of the event, The New York Times published detailed itinerary and agenda of Xi's visit, from delivering a major policy speech at a dinner for business leaders and other dignitaries in Seattle, to a visit to Capitol Hill.

This is not Xi's first visit to the United States, nor his first meeting with Obama. As Obama said in 2013, "President Xi is no stranger to the United States," the report said.

The Seattle Times reported in article "Chinese leader Xi will sweep through Seattle, Everett, Tacoma" that the visit by Xi and his wife to the Tacoma high school comes 21 years after Tacoma and Fuzhou established a sister-city relationship.

Xi was then the Chinese Communist Party chief in Fuzhou, a southeastern city of China.

"Since 1994, our cities have both benefited from a variety of educational, cultural and sports exchanges, and Tacoma has hosted at least 30 delegations from Fuzhou," Marilyn Strickland, mayor of Tacoma, said in a news release.

Besides, the report also highlighted the special bond between China and the state of Washington.

"Over the years, Washington companies have developed strong ties with China, and hundreds of millions of citizens use products from Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks and other Washington companies on a daily basis," Governor Jay Inslee wrote in his invitation to Xi, according to a news release confirming the visit.

"Washington state and China have a 35-year history of mutually beneficial partnerships, including robust trade, scientific research, international education and sustainable development," Kristi Heim, executive director of the Washington State China Relations Council, said in the news release. "We can leverage our region's unique strengths to create a strong positive impact on the future of US-China relations."

Henry Paulson, chairman of the Paulson Institute and a former Treasury secretary, who will sponsor a roundtable discussion attended by Xi and chief executives, wrote in a signed article carried by the Washington Post that both China and the United States are essential to global growth, and both must carry out structural reforms to move their economies onto a growth-conducive footing for the long term.

The biggest risks for China -- and, by extension, for the world -- can be avoided if China does the right things now to deal with its immediate challenges while accelerating Xi's economic reform agenda. It has the necessary tools and financial capacity to do so.

"The United States, for all its differences with Beijing, should be rooting for China's economic reformers to succeed. And as a large holder of Treasury securities and a major funder of US structural deficits, China has a lot at stake in whether the United States undertakes urgent fiscal, tax and structural reforms that will allow our economy to grow faster," he wrote.