China's Vice President, Xi Jinping, Opens U.S. Tour WASHINGTON - China's vice president, Xi Jinping, began a day of high-level meetings here on Tuesday by greeting his host, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who will squire him through a cross-country tour of the United States that amounts to a get-to-know-you exercise for the man widely seen as the next leader of China. In a day of heavily scripted encounters, Mr. Xi met President Obama in the Oval Office, will lunch with Mr. Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham at the State Department, be saluted by an honor guard at the Pentagon, talk to captains of industry at the Chamber of Commerce and join Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill, for a dinner at the vice president's residence at the Naval Observatory. Administration officials are putting particular emphasis on Mr. Xi's stop at the Pentagon, where he is to meet Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey. Mr. Xi holds the title of vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission, but remains a civilian official, making his visit to the Pentagon highly unusual, officials said. China and the United States have had a strained military relationship in recent months, with China balking at Mr. Obama's reassertion of the American military presence in Asia. Current and former officials said they hoped the visit would ease the strains by allowing the administration to clarify its intentions in the region. Tensions over trade issues, which have been spotlighted by election-year rhetoric from both Mr. Obama and his Republican challengers, are also hovering in the background. But administration officials said the point of this visit was less to confront the thorns in the relationship between the United States and China than to cultivate a relationship with the country's likely future leader. Xi Jinping isn't yet the No. 1 official in China, so one likely wouldn't expect him to be breaking new ground," said Daniel Russel, the head of China policy at the National Security Council, in a briefing with reporters on Friday. That said, Mr. Russel noted that the trip was important "for us to learn more about him" and to allow Mr. Xi "to broaden his understanding of the United States." On Monday evening, Mr. Xi dined with Henry A. Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and other foreign-policy grandees at a dinner hosted by China's ambassador to the United States, Zhang Yesui. Mr. Xi's trip also comes at a delicate moment in Chinese politics. Except for Mr. Xi and one other senior official, Li Keqiang, the members of the most powerful policy-making group in the Communist Party, the nine-member Standing Committee of the Politburo, are expected to leave their posts in the fall. The selection for their replacements is a secretive process involving various party elites. Questions were raised about the succession struggle right ahead of Mr. Xi's trip when rumors began circulating in China that the former police chief of Chongqing, the largest western city, might have tried unsuccessfully to defect to the United States through an American consulate and had been sent off to "vacation-style therapy." There was no confirmation of what happened to the police chief, Wang Lijun, at the consulate, but the talk spread quickly across the Internet, and analysts immediately began speculating that the prominent party secretary of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, might have lost any chance he had of getting a Standing Committee seat. So a kind of court intrigue is the backdrop for Mr. Xi's trip, and even Mr. Xi does not have his position locked up yet. A serious misstep on this trip could derail his political ambitions, which have been carefully nurtured from his first political job in Beijing as an aide to an army general to stints in top party posts in the booming coastal provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang. Though Mr. Xi is said to be more garrulous than Hu Jintao, the current president, and Mr. Xi presumably wants to exhibit statesmanship while here, he will still be guarded in his conversations with American leaders, analysts say. "I think we should remember that he has two different audiences," said Cheng Li, a scholar of Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution. One is the international audience, the U.S. audience, and the other is the domestic audience. For him, the domestic audience is more important. As with previous visits by Mr. Hu, American planners are seeking to keep the Chinese delegation at a distance from protesters and journalists. On Monday, hundreds of people gathered outside the White House to denounce Chinese policies in Tibet. Several protestors were arrested after they unfurled a large white banner at Arlington Memorial Bridge that said: "Tibet Will Be Free." Some held up large photos of Tibetans who had self-immolated in recent months out of frustration at Chinese rule. On Monday, a 19-year-old Tibetan monk in China's west became the 23rd to do so, according to the activist group Free Tibet. Security forces quickly doused the flames and took away the monk, identified as Lobsang Gyatso, the group said. Other dissident voices have been making plans to be heard this week. Among them is Yu Jie, a prominent writer who left China for Washington with his family last month because he feared for his life, he said. Mr. Yu said he had been tortured by security officers almost to the point of death in December 2010 and had lived under house arrest. Mr. Yu wrote a book criticizing Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China and is now working on a biography of Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned writer who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. "I'm thinking about carrying some signs with slogans and a photo of Liu Xiaobo," Mr. Yu said in an interview. I want to express my opinion freely now that I'm in a free country. Mr. Russel said the United States would raise human rights issues with Chinese officials. The United States has been troubled by the growing severity of a clampdown by security forces on dissent. Mr. Xi has been on the Standing Committee during that time. But above all, it is economic issues that American officials are keen to address with Mr. Xi and other Chinese officials this week. In a series of formal discussions in recent years, the Americans have tried pushing the Chinese to devalue the Chinese currency, the renminbi, which economists say is kept artificially low; grant greater market access to American companies; and urge China to enforce laws against theft of intellectual property rights. That is likely to be underscored in conversations between Mr. Xi and American business leaders. Mr. Xi is meeting with one group of businesspeople at a lunch on Wednesday in Washington, and with another in Los Angeles, the final stop on his five-day tour. The tour also includes a quick stop in Muscatine, Iowa, where Mr. Xi stayed in the 1980s while on a trip by Chinese officials studying agriculture techniques. In Los Angeles, some Chinese officials in the delegation are expected to meet with American governors from a handful of states. "They recognize the place where they can put a positive face on the relationship is on this business and investment side in the state-to-province framework," said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, who has been advising American politicians on the California leg of the trip.