Although US President Barack Obama has never set foot there, China cast a long shadow in the Pacific region where he grew up.

Obama, who will visit Shanghai and Beijing for the first time on Nov. 15-18, spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, five time zones away from Washington, D.C.; and beginning in 1967, when he was six years old, he lived in Jakarta for four years.

At the time, China was in the throes of Chairman Mao Zedong's bloody Cultural Revolution. Abroad, the nation was less interested in selling widgets than in promoting Mao's brand of radical communism - a force the US saw behind communist movements and political upheaval in Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

In 1979, Obama's senior year at Punahou school in Honolulu, China and the United States normalized diplomatic relations, launching a three-decade period in which ties between the two grew inexorably tighter and deeper - and complicated.

"Think of what China was in 1979: It was an autarkic, insular, inward-looking country that was preoccupied with its own internal things," said a senior US official. "Even 10 years ago ... there was still a sort of sense of 'We're not a part of these global rules, we're not doing this stuff.' Now they see themselves as sitting at the table."

If there were any doubts that China would have a seat at the table from now on, Obama dispelled those when he sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton there on her first official trip abroad - not Pakistan, Afghanistan or any other foreign policy hot spot.

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