China to work with Obama's national security team

China said Tuesday it is looking forward to working with President-elect Barack Obama's national security team, welcoming Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and retired Marine Gen. James Jones as White House national security adviser.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi has already sent a message congratulating both on their appointments.

"Foreign Minister Yang spoke positively of progress made in Sino-US relations in recent years, and is looking forward to working together on promoting constructive and cooperative Sino-US ties," Liu told a news conference.

Liu brushed off reminders that Clinton had been critical of China's human rights record and had urged President George W. Bush not to attend the Beijing Olympic Games' opening ceremony.

"The Beijing Olympics was held successfully and President Bush attended," Liu said, calling Bush's decision to attend "good."

Getting the relationship right is important for both countries, especially with the global economy teetering. While trade issues are likely to dominate, there are a host of global security issues that call for China's cooperation: nuclear nonproliferation and the continuing efforts to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, agreeing on a new climate change treaty, and battling terrorism.

"Most of the staff Obama picked have a fairly good understanding of China. But after all it's a new Cabinet and it takes time to build a good relationship with the Chinese government," said Sun Zhe, an expert on China-U.S. relations at Tsinghua University's Institute of International Studies.

China enjoyed generally good relations with the U.S. and soaring trade during the Bush administration. But other issues such as the environment and climate change will become increasingly important to US-China relations, Sun said. China and the U.S. are the two largest emitters of carbon dioxide and both are major consumers of the world's resources.

Cabinet ministers from the two countries will meet later this week in Beijing for two days of talks on trade, energy and the environment. But talks are likely to be overshadowed by the global financial crisis.

"We need to step up coordination of our macroeconomic policies to ease the current crisis and see the global economy recover at an early date," Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao told reporters last week.

President Hu Jintao warned in a weekend speech that China was losing its competitive edge in trade as global demand plummets in response to the financial crisis, the Communist Party's official People's Daily newspaper said Sunday.

In the U.S. , the National Bureau of Economic Research, a group of academic economists, officially confirmed Monday that the world's largest economy has been suffering through a recession since December 2007.

Sun said that while China would like to cooperate with Obama to help revive the U.S. economy, "we're also considering our own interests first, putting our domestic development as the priority."

During his campaign, Obama described China as "neither our enemy nor our friend; they're competitors." He called for broad cooperation with Beijing while repeating the accusation that the trade surplus was stoked by a Chinese currency kept artificially cheap.