国内英语新闻:World benefits from China-U.S. cooperation -- world media praise Hu's U.S. tour

In recent years, the spirit of cooperation and helping each other to get through difficulties has characterized the interaction between the two countries while they were jointly tackling global challenges. Moreover, it has brought great development opportunities for bilateral ties.

Cooperation was and has been the mainstay of their relations, and will be further strengthened in the future.

In an interview with Xinhua, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen said it's no longer desirable or possible to have a "zero-sum game," that is, to have one country gain all the advantages while the other country suffers. Moreover, he thought President Hu's visit has achieved the overall goal of establishing a closer relationship between the two countries.

Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Xinhua that in his view, the visit "was very important for both sides to have realistic, pragmatic, stable expectations of the other."

Lieberthal added that the Chinese and U.S. presidents made it very clear that the China-U.S. relationship "is too important for us to allow it to deteriorate," as "we have too many overlapping interests and goals that are of significance bilaterally, regionally and globally."

He said both President Hu and President Obama stressed that China and the United States were fully aware of where they differ.

"I think both are committed to working to prevent those differences from seriously reducing our ability to pursue the very important areas where we have similar interest and goals, which are the major part of the relationship," Lieberthal said.

Pierre Picquart, a China expert from the University of Paris, said that during President Hu's U.S. visit, the two sides not only exchanged views on bilateral political and economic issues. Hotspot issues like the Iranian nuclear issue and the situation on the Korean Peninsula, as well as such thorny issue as the RMB exchange rate, were also on the agenda, which reflected an enhanced mutual confidence between the two sides, he said.

Park Young-ho, senior research fellow at the Korean Institute of National Unification in South Korea, said that the two countries reached consensus on cooperation and made economic cooperation an important bridge to consolidate their ties -- despite their differences on issues regarding human rights, the value of the RMB and the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula.

Gu said though it was unlikely that the two sides would resolve their deeper structural differences during the visit, they realized that cooperation, and strategic cooperation, is the only way out: Their correlation and interdependence as a result of globalization have reduced the effect of such traditional means as military confrontation and Cold War.

The Wall Street Journal said that President Obama and President Hu, seeking a steadier footing for the often-troubled U.S.-China relationship, played up the two nations' common interests and soft-pedaled or ignored longstanding issues that divide them.

Their ambiguous "neither friend nor foe" is emerging as the operating principle behind the globe's most critical bilateral relationship.

As put by President Hu, the two countries would benefit from working together and harm themselves by being rivals, and the Cold War mentality should have been abandoned long ago, Brazil's O Estado de San Paulo newspaper said.

After a difficult year in 2010, which saw various frictions between the two sides, both countries are looking forward to rebuilding mutual confidence by using Hu's visit as an opportunity, the newspaper said.