WASHINGTON DC, United States — COMPANIES in the US have long demanded that China let its currency rise to make US exports cheaper. But as President Hu Jintao visits Washington this week, US companies are stressing other goals: Stopping the theft of intellectual property and getting a fair chance to win government contracts.

No one expects any big breakthroughs. Instead, many US companies hold out hope that the meetings between Hu and President Barack Obama will make it easier to reach long-term solutions to the major trade disputes dividing the world’s two largest economies.

Hu sounded conciliatory on the eve of his trip.

“We both stand to gain from a sound China-US relationship, and lose from confrontation,” he said in responses to questions from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

But Hu also argued that the US dollar’s dominance of financial markets was a “product of the past,” suggesting China would seek a more assertive role in the future. He passed up a chance to signal China’s willingness to let its currency rise further against the dollar, a key US demand.

“We should expect over time incremental progress,” says Myron Brilliant, senior vice-president for international affairs at the US Chamber of Commerce.

The Chinese currency, the yuan, has long been the No 1 irritant in US-China trade relations. The US and other countries charge that China keeps its currency artificially low. They say that this gives Chinese exporters an unfair edge. A low-priced yuan makes Chinese products cheaper in the US and US products costlier in China.

The currency tensions have eased in recent weeks. In part, that’s because the yuan has climbed 3.5 per cent against the dollar since June. Its rise is even larger — about five per cent — if inflation is taken into account.

And many economists think Beijing will push the yuan higher to fight resurgent inflation. That would reduce the cost of US and other foreign products in China.

Yet Hu seemed to dismiss that idea in his comments to the US newspapers. “Inflation can hardly be the main factor in determining the exchange-rate policy,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner declared China’s currency “significantly undervalued” in advance of Hu’s visit.

Obama is sure to raise concerns about the yuan’s value in his discussions with Hu. But the Chinese are just as sure to avoid the appearance of bowing to foreign pressure.

“The Chinese are going to move fairly cautiously,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, a private forecasting firm. “Our best bet is that Beijing will move the currency up by around five to seven per cent a year for the next two to three years.”

Yesterday, the Beijing government said a Chinese trade mission signed US$600 million in deals with US companies ahead of Hu’s visit, and a separate delegation will pursue other opportunities.

The six deals signed Monday in Houston cover imports of porcelain and cotton and an agreement to collaborate on developing solar power equipment, the government said.

America’s trade deficit with the world, estimated at US$500 billion last year, would drop by up to US$120 billion if China let the yuan rise 2 0 per cent over the next three years, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank.

Such a change would create about a half-million US jobs, mainly in manufacturing, which typically pays above-average wages, the institute’s economists are forecasting.

Three Senate Democrats plan to push legislation to penalise countries that manipulate their currencies and hurt US exports. And Republican Sen Lindsey Graham of South Carolina plans to reintroduce a bill to strengthen the Treasury Department’s ability to counter currency manipulation.

“Working men and women are losing jobs because of unfair trade manipulation, and it’s a politically tenuous place for the Republican Party to be seen as defending that,” Graham told The Associated Press.

But dealing with the “currency will not be enough,” notes former US Trade Rep. Charlene Barshefsky.

US companies are also bristling, for example, at a policy China adopted in 2009, called “indigenous innovation.” The policy limits Beijing’s purchases of foreign products to those designed in China.

US businesses see the policy as a ploy to force them to turn over their technology to China or be locked out of business with the government. More than 25 per cent of US companies that responded to a survey by the US-China Business Council last year said they’d lost business because of the policy.

When it joined the World Trade Organization nine years ago, Beijing promised to give foreign companies a fair chance to sell to the government. By most accounts, it hasn’t done so.

“In terms of government procurement, every year is the year of the snail in China,” said Frank Vargo, vice-president for international affairs at the National Association of Manufacturers. “China is still a state-managed economy, and government procurement is enormous. China has simply not opened that market.”

But Hu told the Journal and the Post that foreign companies’ “innovation, production and business operations in China enjoy the same treatment as Chinese enterprises.”

US software companies say they’re also being cheated out of billions in sales because Chinese companies and even government agencies illegally copy their programs, instead of buying them. Likewise, Hollywood has demanded that Beijing crack down on the widespread sale of pirated movie DVDs in Chinese markets.

“China remains behind the rest of the world” in safeguarding intellectual property, says Ken Wasch, president of the Software & Information Industry Association.