U.S.-China summit: The ground shifts

For most of the past year (or longer), a key theme of the contentious U.S.-China economic relationship has been the appropriate level of the Chinese yuan.

“China’s exchange rate needs to strengthen in response to market forces,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a speech in Washington last week. China's policies, he added, “have the effect of keeping the Chinese currency substantially undervalued.”

But according to the latest chatter out of Washington this morning, the main focus may be shifting to something more basic, and less technical: access to the Chinese market for U.S. companies.

Here's how Helene Cooper and and Mark Landler of the New York Times put it, succinctly, this morn:

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."

Thanks to a new series of trade restrictions imposed by the Chinese goverment to protect home-grown companies and industries, General Electric, Microsoft, and plenty others are grumbling. As a result, the Obama administration may be willing to take a harsher tone with Hu and Co.

U.S. companies need new growth markets, of course. China — with its 1.3 billion potential consumers, and its growing middle class — offers a mouth-watering opportunity.

But it's never been easy to do business in China for a host of cultural, political and economic reasons.

The running cliche you hear from American business executives from Beijing to Shanghai and beyond?

"In China, anything is possible. Nothing is easy."