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Obama’s Focus in China Is on Leader, Not Public

President Obama joined peers in Chinese garb on Monday, starting a visit focusing on his ties to President Xi Jinping.Credit...Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto Agency

BEIJING — President Obama is in China for less than three days this week, but he is seeing a great deal of President Xi Jinping.

On Tuesday, they will go for a quiet walk in Mr. Xi’s walled compound and have dinner. The next day, they will take part in a formal welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People and toast each other at a state banquet.

Mr. Obama will spend far less quality time with the broader Chinese population. There are no town-hall-style meetings, televised interviews or major speeches on his schedule.

Much of that was due to time constraints: squeezing an economic summit meeting and a state visit into three days, before the president leaves on Wednesday to travel to Myanmar and Australia, is no easy task. But the itinerary also reflects the White House’s decision to nurture the one-on-one relationship between Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi in favor of reaching out to the Chinese public.

The White House has learned that those efforts are often stymied by the Chinese government. When Mr. Obama took part in a town-hall meeting on his first visit here as president in 2009, his hosts tried to limit the audience and control the questions. They refused to stream the session on the Internet or mention it on the evening news broadcasts.

These restrictions were amplified by the American news media and cast a shadow over Mr. Obama’s trip, reinforcing a narrative that the president was vulnerable to Chinese manipulation. White House officials said they got a big audience and deemed the event worthwhile, but the endless haggling with the Chinese left them fed up.

The White House has also changed its approach to the Chinese news media. In 2009, Mr. Obama gave an interview to Southern Weekly, a newspaper based in Guangdong Province that is known for pushing the limits of China’s censorship rules. The government clumsily censored the transcript, leaving in Mr. Obama’s lighthearted observations about basketball.

This time, the White House is granting a written interview with Mr. Obama to China’s official news agency, Xinhua. That interview, combined with the president’s encounters with Mr. Xi, ensures that his visit will be widely covered here, officials said.

White House officials note that when Michelle Obama visited China last March with her daughters, Malia and Sasha, they did plenty of public diplomacy — playing table tennis, dabbling in calligraphy, practicing tai chi and trudging up the Great Wall.

Moreover, they said, Mr. Obama did his part for people-to-people relations, announcing a reciprocal agreement with China to extend tourist and business visas to 10 years from one year, and student visas to five years from one. The deal, he said, will create jobs, make it easier for businesspeople to invest and encourage thousands of exchange students.

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From left, Hassanal Bolkiah, the sultan of Brunei; President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia; President Xi Jinping of China and his wife, Peng Liyuan; and President Obama at a ceremonial reception on Monday that was part of a summit meeting in Beijing.Credit...Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev

The amount of time Mr. Obama is willing to lavish on Mr. Xi attests to the power of a single Chinese citizen. Mr. Xi’s status as the nation’s paramount leader has only been enhanced since the two men spent nearly eight hours in discussions in June 2013, strolling amid the cactuses of the Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

By contrast, the White House played down a brief encounter between Mr. Obama and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the opening ceremony of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum on Monday. The two leaders did not have time to say more than hello, an official said.

The White House is well aware that Mr. Obama’s encounters with Mr. Xi run the risk of looking stage-managed, which is one reason American officials are pushing the Chinese authorities to permit questions when the two men are to deliver public statements on Tuesday.

So far, the answer has been no, and history suggests that will be hard to reverse. Hu Jintao, the former president, did not take questions when he appeared with Mr. Obama in 2009. White House officials insist they have not lost hope: They say they will keep lobbying the Chinese until just before the leaders take the stage.

“If you go back to when Chinese leaders have agreed to joint press availabilities, you’ll have a very hard time finding one where they have been willing to take questions,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a former adviser on China in the Clinton administration. “We want it; they don’t. They are the host, and that’s where we end up.”

In Beijing, Mr. Obama appeared determined not to antagonize his host. Asked about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, Mr. Obama appealed for restraint, saying that while the United States did not necessarily agree with China about the issues behind the standoff, it did not want to see the tensions erupt into violence.

“Obviously, the situation between China and Hong Kong is historically complicated and is in the process of transition,” he said in carefully calibrated remarks.

“Our primary message has been to make sure violence is avoided,” the president said, adding: “We don’t expect China to follow an American model in every instance. But we’re going to continue to have concerns about human rights.”

The president also put in a pitch for his ambitious trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, when meeting with the leaders of other countries involved in those negotiations. “Today is an opportunity, at the political level, for us to break some remaining logjams,” he said.

But that trade deal does not include China, and in a subsequent speech to business executives, Mr. Obama twice repeated, “the United States welcomes the rise of a prosperous, peaceful and stable China.”

Certainly, China’s prosperous side was on vivid display. Mr. Xi welcomed leaders from the 20 other members of APEC with a dazzling display of fireworks and technology, including an illuminated red carpet that rolled out in front of their motorcades.

And in a goofy bit of APEC tradition, Mr. Xi outfitted them in native garb: Chinese-style shirts with Mandarin collars. Mr. Obama tried to end the tradition when the conference was held in Hawaii in 2011. But on Monday he dutifully turned up in a purple silk shirt that looked more “Star Trek” than Shanghai Tang.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama’s Focus in China Is on Leader, Not Public. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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