Bush Voices Concerns To China

(CBS/AP)  U.S. President George W. Bush pressed China to expand religious, political and social freedoms and won renewed promises — but no concrete actions — from President Hu Jintao to open China's huge markets to U.S. farmers and businesses.

Hu said the two leaders sought an outcome of "mutual benefit and win-win results."

But their meeting Sunday at the Great Hall of the People on the edge of Tiananmen Square appeared to produce no breakthroughs on U.S. demands for currency reforms in China, and no details about how China would cut its trade surplus with the United States, on track to hit US$200 billion this year.

Mr. Bush's two-day China stop — his third as president to the communist giant — was the centerpiece of a weeklong Asia tour, which also includes a four-hour stop in Mongolia on Monday. But during his tour, an acrid debate at home about the war in Iraq has followed him. While overseas, the White House has not let a day go by without a no-holds-barred verbal counterattack against Democratic critics of the president's war policies.

Mr. Bush again Rep. John Murtha's call to pull troops out of Iraq. CBS News chief White House correspondent John Roberts reports that Mr. Bush was careful to say that while he disagrees with Murtha's policy he respects the Congressman. The gentle language stood in contrast to an earlier White House attack which compared Murtha

to anti-war filmmaker Michael Moore (video).

Mr. Bush appeared determined Sunday to scale back the rhetoric. Appearing before reporters at his hotel before he attended a lavish dinner with his Chinese hosts, Mr. Bush rejected the notion that it is unpatriotic to disagree with him.

"People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq," he said. "This is not an issue of who is patriotic and who is not patriotic. It's an issue of an honest open debate about the way forward in Iraq."

A Chinese crackdown on dissidents before Mr. Bush arrived dismayed U.S. officials, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. side would continue to raise the issue "quite vociferously with the Chinese government."

She also expressed disappointment with China's response to a U.S. request in September for action on specific human rights cases — a list Bush described bluntly as "dissidents that we believe are unfairly imprisoned."

"We've certainly not seen the progress that we would expect," Rice said.

Yet Bush took satisfaction in the fact that Hu mentioned human rights when the two leaders made joint statements to the press.

"Those who watch China closely would say that maybe a decade ago, a leader wouldn't have uttered those comments," Bush said. "He talked about democracy."

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