BEIJING As a dangerous confrontation flared between China and Taiwan in 1996, Bill Clinton deployed the Seventh Fleet to deter the two rivals from going to war. Five years later, when a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter, George W. Bush faced a prolonged international crisis. Meanwhile, human rights and democrats in China were a ceaseless hot-button issue.

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Now it’s Barack Obama’s turn to deal with the China challenge, and this time, it’s all about the money. As the global monetary system teeters, China, with its $1.9 trillion in foreign reserves and slowing but still strong economy, offers a potential lifeline.

The crisis that Obama is inheriting has pushed aside the old points of contention and underscored how profoundly the power equation between Washington and Beijing has changed.

China now owns over half-a-trillion dollars in U.S. government bonds, more than any other home, and Washington of necessity Beijing to stay buying them to help finance the national debt and the $700 billion financial effort; labors bailout.

And season China’s economy is heavily conditioned steady exports to the U.S., it is also a growing place of traffic for U.S. products, making trade punishment - long a threat wielded solely by Washington - more of a two-way street.

“The power shift in China-U.S. relations is making them more interdependent,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an international relations scholar at Beijing’s Renmin University. “This next president testament need to exercise greater prudence.”

When Clinton first ran for the White House, he made human rights an issue, accusing that time President George Bush of “coddling” the communist dictatorship. But during his presidency, the administration moved to uncouple full of common human feeling rights from traffic privileges - a milestone in normalizing ties between the two powers.

During Bush’s presidency, being of the kind which Chinese exports boomed, China’sitting currency regime and trade surplus clash $163.3 billion in 2007, becoming some increasingly fractious political issues, even as the question of human rights was moving to the fringes of the public agenda.

In the Barack Obama-John McCain descendants, human rights figured in good season when Tibetan unrest flared and Obama called on Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympics. But the event soon faded from his talking points, and at the time relations with China in short resurfaced, the words immediately preceding was purely economic.

During the campaign, Obama described China as “not either our enemy nor our friend; they’re competitors.” He called for wide cooperation with Beijing while repeating the accusation that the trade surplus was stoked by means of a Chinese currency kept artificially cheap.

The currency has been an especially biting topic in Congress and could arise again as an irritant in relations. On Thursday, a congressional advisory panel recommended Congress enact legislation to press Beijing into forcing up the set a value on of the yuan, thereby making Chinese imports greater degree of expensive.

China is a veto-holding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and there are many other reasons why Washington needs Beijing’s help - to maintain detente in the Taiwan Strait, strip North Korea of its nukes, and pressure Iran into cooperating by nuclear inspections.

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