Obama Hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping.
ROMANS: All right. President Obama hosts Chinese President Xi Jinping for a private dinner tonight at the White House. The two men have developed a strong relationship, but their countries are at odds with military, economic and human rights issues, creating a widening divide. I got to say, the tensions between these two countries are the highest they have been in years. The White House is hoping the president's friendship with Mr. Xi will help the two countries find a better way forward. Let's get the latest from CNN's Andrew Stevens live from Hong Kong. You know, Andrew, it would take me four or five minutes to tick off the things that happened in the last year that had been irritants between the United States and China. This is probably the most important relationship in the world, quite frankly, and it's been really rocky lately.</s>ANDREW STEVENS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. There is more going wrong than is going right, certainly, Christine. The president has been in the U.S. and he has been getting a steady drum beat of complaints about cyber security. That seems to be the topic of the discussions so far. He talked about it himself when he gave his keynote address, what is billed as a big policy speech. And he has been meeting with key executives and particularly from the tech industry in Seattle today before going to Washington. You know, there were some big bits at those meetings, too. You've had the leading companies, you had companies like Apple, like Amazon, like Microsoft, all piling into a forum where Mr. Xi was. He had his own team there as well. He had representatives from Baidu, from Alibaba. These are giant internet companies in their own rights. But the absolute topic of conversation was the complaints by the Americans lead, I should say, by the commerce secretary. So, Mr. Xi is going to be aware of what he can expect when he meets Mr. Obama. The commerce secretary talking about lack of market access, hacking, intellectual property rights, you know, piracy, all these things they say is going on in China, and they cannot get an even break in China if they can get in at all. President Xi is responding, saying, we will open things up more, we will make it more accessible for U.S. companies, although the Internet is always going to have very strong characteristics. But it seems to be a matter, Christine, more of deeds that words.</s>ROMANS: Yes.</s>STEVENS: And they almost like talking past each other at the moment.</s>ROMANS: Yes. And, you know, I got to say, when you look at that -- we just saw Satya Nadella, who runs Microsoft on one of those photos. When you look at some of the, you know, top tech talent who met with President Xi, it's so interesting to me that many -- for many of them, their products are hacked, banned or censored in China.</s>STEVENS: Let's talk about Mark Zuckerberg, for example. Facebook isn't in China. Google is not in China. And it speaks to the fact that, it shows how desperate they want to get in there. This is a massive market, 1.2 billion mobile phones, 600 million subscribers on the Internet. This is a huge, very, very lucrative market. They feel they are being shut out. If they do get in, they are treated unfairly. And on top of that, there's this whole illegal structure about being hacked, having corporate secrets taken. I mean, just generally, and this is a private think tank coming out with this number, Christine -- $300 billion is lost to U.S. companies in hacking through taking commercial secrets a year. That is an astonishing number.</s>ROMANS: Well, that's the business angle, and then there's the government angle. The big concerns among U.S. officials that China and China's military are somehow behind some of the major sensitive hacks of government information. Do you think that's going to come up at this meeting? Do you think the president personally would talk to President Xi about this? Or is that something that they're underlings talk about?</s>STEVENS: That is an interesting question. I can't see why it wouldn't come up. Obama has another 16 months left in office. This is a big deal. Hacking, and it is absolutely clouding the relationship between the two countries. You are right about that. There's just been a new report out in "The Wall Street Journal" today pointing to a unit of the People's Liberation Army, the PLA, which is using Chinese hacktivists to get access to key computer networks not just for the U.S., but countries around the South China Sea. We know the China is building these structures in the South China Sea, basically expanding their territory. A lot of countries in the vicinity have been complaining hard. Those countries are now being targeted. This is according to a ThreatConnect, which is a cyber security firm. So, it is not just the U.S., it is a much bigger than that. But it is an issue that the White House needs to address and President Xi has to face this as well, because these reports come out relentlessly.</s>ROMANS: Always so difficult in diplomacy with the Chinese, because they also don't want to be told what to do. They don't want Americans meddling in their internal politics and their internal politics are all about maintaining control, maintaining control and stability, social stability in the country, real complicated stuff. Thank you so much, Andrew Stevens. We'll talk to you in about a half hour again with any new developments. Thank you, Andrew.</s>BERMAN: All right. Talk about a big day in Washington. President Xi arrives, Pope Francis set to speak to Congress. No pope has ever done this before. What will he say? Will he touch hot button issues? We'll discuss next.