WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama issued a finely tuned call for greater respect for human rights on Wednesday in his speech to welcome his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao. 
 
 President Barack Obama (R) listens as Chinese President Hu Jintao speaks during a joint news conference at the White House in Washington January 19, 2011. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque 
 
 Hu’s four-day state visit to the United States has become a lightning rod for advocates of China’s minority Uighurs, Tibetans, imprisoned democracy advocates and other disgruntled groups. Hundreds have converged on Washington to protest. 
 
 “History shows that societies are more harmonious, nations are more successful and the world is more just when the rights and responsibilities of all nations and all people are upheld, including the universal rights of every human being,” Obama said during a welcoming ceremony for Hu outside the White House. 
 
 “Harmonious Society” is a key ideological slogan of Hu’s government as it tries to maintain his Communist Party’s grip on power in an increasingly free market economy. 
 
 The activists, who say that rights conditions have worsened in recent years despite China’s rapid economic growth and expanding global influence, have pressed Obama to address their concerns both publicly and privately with Hu. 
 
 Some 200 Tibetans and their American supporters staged a colorful protest in Lafayette Park across from the White House, chanting “Who is a liar? Hu Jintao is a liar” and “Killer, killer, Hu Jintao.” 
 
 Two actors wearing 12-foot-tall (4-meter-tall) skeleton costumes chased down others wearing a long Chinese dragon outfit and attacked it until it collapsed on the sidewalk in front of a banner that said, “Hu has Tibetan skeletons in his closet.” 
 
 “We’re here to urge President Obama to raise the issue of human rights and freedom for the Tibetan people during his talk with President Hu Jintao, publicly and vigorously, because these are universal values and especially ones that us Americans ... cherish,” said Tenzin Dolkar, USA grassroots director for Students for a Free Tibet. 
 
 Nearby, members of the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement 
 
 China banned in 1999, held a silent vigil in front of banners and placards saying, “Please help to stop persecuting Falun Gong.” 
 
 Obama has faced criticism from the U.S. media and some lawmakers during his two years in office for appearing reticent about repression in countries like China, Russia and Egypt. 
 
 Obama was also under pressure from some U.S. lawmakers to raise rights issues with Hu. They argue that the U.S. president, who won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, has a duty to speak out to the jailer of the 2010 Nobel peace laureate, Chinese writer and rights activist Liu Xiaobo. 
 
 In a key speech on China ahead of Hu’s visit last week, week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Beijing to release Liu and “the many other political prisoners in China, including those under house arrest and those enduring enforced disappearances.” 
 
 China rejects criticism of its human rights record as interference in its internal affairs. ||||| “He wants to go out with the country’s most important bilateral relationship intact,” said a Western diplomat based in Beijing who spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of the subject. 
 
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 But Mr. Hu’s calm also reflects a more confident China. As a Chinese scholar at Indiana University , Scott Kennedy, noted in a recent essay, Mr. Hu’s comments are at odds with his host’s. 
 
 “His description of China took it as a given that China is a leading global power and a central member of the international system,” Mr. Kennedy wrote of Mr. Hu, “and such standing is not conditional on U.S. approval.” 
 
 China has also emphasized the need to allow Mr. Hu to enjoy all the trappings of a formal state visit. Chinese officials are still smarting from a decision by the Bush administration not to call his first visit as president five years ago a state visit. The administration then botched the White House reception for the Chinese leader, when an announcer mistakenly referred to China’s national anthem using the formal name of its arch rival, Taiwan , and a protester was able to heckle Mr. Hu while he spoke to a crowd on the South Lawn. 
 
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 Obama administration officials say that this time, as Mr. Hu prepares for a transition to retirement , the logistics or ceremonial aspects of his trip have in some ways eclipsed the policy items on the bilateral agenda. 
 
 His trip begins with the expected: a dinner with President Obama on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday a formal arrival ceremony, bilateral meetings and a joint news conference, followed by more socializing and a state dinner at the White House. 
 
 But it gets more interesting. On Thursday, he talks again to a lobby group, the usually sympathetic US-China Business Council, which will be looking for Mr. Hu to toss some bones to American companies. Then he goes on to Chicago — a visit to Mr. Obama’s adopted hometown, but also a chance to show China’s rising role in the world. 
 
 Mr. Hu will visit a Chinese-owned auto parts plant and apparently also the Confucius Institute in Chicago, one of the cultural centers that China has been establishing around the world — as part of a “soft power” offensive that Beijing has pursued for a few years. 
 
 This is the real message of the trip: despite all the huff and puff, China and its sometimes maddeningly opaque system, with its somewhat colorless leaders, is here to stay. ||||| WASHINGTON — A year ago, the fight over how China ’s cheap currency was hurting American companies in marketplaces at home and abroad was shaping up to be the epic battle between the world’s biggest power and its biggest economic rival. 
 
 But when President Hu Jintao walks into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with President Obama on Wednesday to face a group of 18 American and Chinese business leaders, much of the clash will be about a new economic battlefield — inside China itself. 
 
 A series of trade restrictions imposed by the Chinese government within China, including administrative controls, requirements to transfer sophisticated technology, state subsidies to favored domestic companies and so-called indigenous laws meant to favor homegrown businesses, have angered many American manufacturing and high-tech companies, which are rapidly finding themselves cut out of the world’s fastest growing market. 
 
 The result is that the two countries have to resolve a wider range of economic tensions, including what American multinational corporations see as a deteriorating environment for investing and making money in what has become the world’s second largest economy. 
 
 So it is no longer just a fight over cheap Chinese textile, electronic and toy imports. China won that battle years ago. Now the question — reminiscent of trade tensions with Japan in the 1980s — is whether General Electric and Microsoft and other American companies that dearly want to expand into China’s rapidly expanding markets will find themselves beaten at their own game by Chinese companies, backed by the Chinese government, “competing at every point in the technology spectrum,” said Eswar Shanker Prasad, a former economist with the International Monetary Fund who now teaches trade policy at Cornell University. 
 
 Myron Brilliant, a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said, “It’s no longer just a question of Nucor complaining about dumping,” referring to the American steel manufacturing company that has accused China of selling steel fasteners and bolts at below-market prices abroad. “Those concerns may not be going away, but the noise out there now has additional voices. The voices are not just low-cost products coming here; the competition is about China’s marketplace.” 
 
 For Mr. Obama, the shift gives him stronger backing from American businesses for a tougher approach to China when he sits down with Mr. Hu. The Chinese president arrived in Washington on Tuesday afternoon for two full days of high-level meetings that began with a private dinner at the White House on Tuesday evening. 
 
 “The business community has historically been the bastion of support for the U.S.-China relationship,” said Michael Froman, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, in an interview. “Now that support is more qualified.” Mr. Froman said that Mr. Obama and American officials would be “underscoring the importance of addressing these issues if we’re going to have a level playing field.” 
 
 American companies have always had a love-hate relationship with China — with the manufacturing companies in the South and steel companies in the Midwest urging the government to take tough action against China, and advanced manufacturers and high-tech companies that want access to the Chinese marketplace pressing for a more conciliatory tone. 
 
 Now, both sides seem to want the administration to get tough. Last year, Jeffrey R. Immelt of G.E. complained to a meeting of business leaders in Rome that it was getting harder for foreign companies to do business in China, and he expressed a growing irritation that China was protecting its own national companies at the detriment of American companies. 
 
 Google last March moved its Chinese service out of mainland China to avoid censorship rules. The American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing has also complained that is members are facing an increasingly difficult regulatory environment. 
 
 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner signaled the Obama administration’s stance in a speech last week, when he said that the United States would grant China more access to high-tech American products and expand trade and investment opportunities within the United States only if China opened its own domestic market to American products. That push for market access, administration officials said, will be at the top of Mr. Obama’s agenda with Mr. Hu, both during their one-on-one meetings and when they meet with the business leaders. 
 
 American multinational corporations, experts said, are hurt by Chinese regulations that openly favor Chinese companies over foreign ones for government contracts. These rules, which are intended to stimulate technological innovation in China, have the effect of cutting American and other non-Chinese companies out of many of the big contracts there. 
 
 “U.S. companies have issues with China in many different business sectors,” said John Frisbie, president of the U.S.-China Business Council in Washington. “But if I were to point to one single issue over the last year, it has been China’s innovation policies and how they link to government procurement.” ||||| Campaigners for human rights in China today called on Barack Obama to press Hu Jintao on the issue during the Chinese president's state visit. 
 
 They also urged the US president to "publicly and privately" demand the release of the jailed dissident and Nobel peace price laureate Liu Xiaobo and other activists. 
 
 The Chinese Human Rights Defenders network urged the US government to live up to its own promises, citing Obama's speech to the UN last autumn, which stressed that "part of the price of our own freedom is standing up for the freedom of others ... this belief will guide America's leadership". 
 
 Shang Baojun, Liu's lawyer, said: "I hope [as a result of the visit] the Sino-US relationship can be more stable and develop in a better direction. 
 
 "I also hope changes and improvements can be made in certain areas, including human rights and the situation of prisoners of conscience, at least to create opportunities which will introduce a different voice to President Hu." 
 
 Feng Zhenghu, a dissident who was not allowed back into China at the time Obama visited in 2009, although he has since been able to return, said: "I don't really have many expectations of his trip to the US this time. It is not pessimism, just realism. 
 
 "I think the topics will mainly be about economic and trade issues. As a citizen of the country, I care more about other things. It is not realistic to hope that a state visit can bring much change in those areas, so I don't have high expectations." 
 
 However, although Hu and Obama are scheduled to have one to one talks in the Oval Office later today, human rights and other concerns, which have made relations between the two nations delicate, will be sidelined for most of the first full day of a four-day state visit. 
 
 The US is putting out the flags for the major visit by the head of an equal – and by some measures greater – superpower. 
 
 Hu formally welcomed with an arrival ceremony, lunch at the State Department and a full state banquet at the White House, reciprocating the formality of Obama's state visit to Beijing in 2009. 
 
 Human rights activists are determined that the plight of China's dissidents must not be ignored amid the diplomatic niceties. 
 
 Placard-carrying protesters turned up outside the White House, although their presence was cut from news reports shown in China. 
 
 On his last visit, in 2006, Hu had a working White House lunch with President George Bush – something seen by the Chinese as a grave insult. 
 
 Since then, China's economy has grown to the extent that Hu and Obama now meet as equals. According to some analysts, China may already have overtaken the US in terms of the absolute size of its economy. 
 
 It is lending more to developing countries than the World Bank, according to the Financial Times, and its armed forces – the 2.2 million soldiers of the People's Liberation Army – are the biggest in the world. US exports to China, at $81.8bn (£51.17bn), are dwarfed by the $344.1bn the US imports. 
 
 China is mounting a public relations offensive coinciding with the visit, including an image of the Chinese basketball star Yao Ming towering over Times Square on a giant advertising screen.
– President Obama has no shortage of things to discuss with Hu Jintao, who arrived in Washington yesterday—starting with the fate of Liu Xiaobo. Chinese human rights advocates urged Obama to “publicly and privately” press for Liu’s release, according to the Guardian, and that call was echoed by House Human Rights Committee Chairman Chris Smith, who told Reuters it would be “almost unthinkable” that a Nobel laureate like Obama to meet with “a political leader responsible for jailing another laureate” and not demand his release. Of course, Obama will also have a variety of economic issues to discuss, which have become thornier than ever, the New York Times observes. This time, Obama won’t just be discussing China’s cheap currency, he’ll be addressing complaints from US companies that they’re being locked out of the Chinese market by policies favorable to domestic Chinese businesses. Hu, meanwhile, wants to make nice, reports the Times. He's seen as a lame duck who "wants to go out with the country’s most important bilateral relationship intact,” says one diplomat.