China’s President Hu Jintao made a state visit to Washington on January 18-20. Commentators in the United States and China largely pronounced his visit a “success,” citing a variety of reasons. But the most important reason was the efforts of Presidents Hu and Obama to dispel “strategic mistrust” between the two sides.

Since the conclusion of President Obama’s own state visit to China in November 2009, Beijing has produced increasingly conflicting signals about its views on relations with the United States. Active and retired senior officers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for the first time, on their own initiative, adopted assertive stances in China’s unofficial and official media against U.S. activities in the Asia-Pacific region. (Media statements by American commanders, on separate subjects, but no less out of line with policy as those of the Chinese generals and admirals, got them fired quickly. Not so for the Chinese flag officers.)

Civilian officials struggled to adhere to established policy to work constructively with Washington while experimenting with increasingly nationalist rhetoric evidently intended to prevent them from seeming “politically incorrect” in the charged media atmosphere at home. Over the first nine months of 2010, it appeared that the civilians were losing ground to the military’s offensive.

The prospects of increasingly dangerous competition between the United States and China grew worrisome. Paranoid Chinese critics of the United States everywhere saw American efforts to “contain” China’s rise. Americans increasingly suspected China of trying to displace American dominance in the region and threaten the U.S. economy.

The situation became in some ways—but not all—analogous to Japanese politics in the 1930s, when militarists first intimidated (and ultimately even assassinated) civilian officials. It became incumbent upon current American officials that they move quickly to establish greater mutual trust through active and visible cooperation with Chinese counterparts, to show their respective publics the benefits of cooperation over conflict before the situation gets out of hand. That was something American and Japanese policy in the 1930s tragically failed to accomplish.

To pull the relationship out of its downward spiral, the Obama administration took the initiative, sending then Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and National Economic Advisor Larry Summers to Beijing in September 2010. They presented their receptive Chinese civilian hosts a roadmap intended to lead to a successful state visit by Hu Jintao. Beyond that, the Obama administration hoped to continue to deny hardliners opportunities to hijack relations, while building a framework within which to deal with coming friction and competition between the two.

Landmarks on the roadmap included improving trade relations, restoring military-to-military ties, currency revaluation, reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula, climate cooperation, and promoting human rights. China subsequently moved its positions on all these issues, except human rights, in the direction the United States was seeking, though usually only partially or conditionally. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in December seized the Chinese leadership and—sadly and ironically—may have dimmed the chances for some symbolic concessions to the Obama administration before Hu’s state visit.

By December, China used the annual Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) to address growing complaints from the American business community about market access, intellectual property protection, government procurement rules and indigenous innovation. So far it’s mostly promises, but at least they have been welcomed by affected businesses and by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. China also bundled trade deals to unwrap at the time of the visit, nominally worth over $50 billion.

Over three months, China restored military relations step by step, leading to a visit by Secretary of Defense Bob Gates to China the week before Hu’s state visit. Rogue comments by Chinese generals virtually disappeared from the media. Gates agreed to further senior military visits to the United States by the chief of the general staff, Chen Bingde, and commander of the strategic weapons’ second artillery, Jing Zhiyuan. These will be complemented by visits to China in 2011 by joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and Pacific Commander Bob Willard. This is a wary process, where suspicions run deepest, but where the benefits could be most felt eventually.

China continued its very gradual revaluation of the renminbi up to the state visit, and Secretary of the Treasury Geithner credited China with a nominal 3.6 percent revaluation, but a real increase of 10 percent due to the effects of Chinese inflation. At Cancun, Chinese and American negotiators reached consensus on how to handle “verification, reporting, and monitoring” commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, a subject of acrimonious contention a year earlier at Copenhagen.

Perhaps most encouraging to the Obama administration, China shed its recent hands-off approach to inter-Korean tensions. This required extra U.S. diplomacy to adjust China’s posture, following the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island and the revelation of the North’s new uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon, including a strongly worded phone call from Obama to Hu on December 5. He then sent emissaries Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg and NSC Senior Director Jeffrey Bader to China to discuss how to prevent escalation on the peninsula from drawing U.S. forces in deeper.

In the meantime, North Korea backed down from its escalatory stance after a visit to Pyongyang by Chinese trouble shooter State Councilor Dai Bingguo, allowing observers to infer a reassessment by Beijing of the proximate source of instability on the peninsula and realization of the need to warn the North off. During the state visit, China moreover agreed for the first time to language in a joint statement that formally acknowledged “concern” about the North’s military and nuclear activities.

Building on that, President Obama again sent Steinberg and Bader to Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing this week to look for ways to put these advances into a more constructive framework to prolong the current calm and work on sources of tensions. Seoul will need special attention to find a means to resume negotiations in the face of Pyongyang’s so far adamant refusal to express regret for causing the loss of South Korean lives.

Both presidents used their official remarks in Washington repeatedly to reassure each other’s peoples that the United States is not out to “contain” China and that China is not out to displace the United States or undermine its economy. In his final speech in Washington, President Hu put to rest the simmering debate about China’s reportedly expanding list of “core interests” in Asia, by limiting them to Taiwan and Tibet, and not including the South China Sea or other regions.

This was an especially meticulously prepared state visit. President Obama received outside briefings on strategic and political issues and human rights. The secretaries of defense, commerce, state and treasury all gave pointed speeches which set out expectations and concerns respecting China going forward. Obama’s own public remarks carefully handled U.S. concerns about Taiwan and human rights, where the joint statement could not produce an agreed text.

Capping the state visit’s successes in reducing suspicion, addressing Korean tensions, and increasing a host of contacts is the planned exchange of visits by the U.S. and Chinese vice presidents. Joe Biden will visit China in the first half of this year and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, will visit the United States in the second half. These “action-forcing events” will have the effect of focusing the respective bureaucracies on delivering successes for their bosses.

Besides giving Americans a chance to measure in person China’s likely next president for the coming ten years, they will help provide a structure to relations over time that could soften the inevitable jolts to emerge in such a big and competitive relationship. This could prove especially of value during the 2012 turbulent election year, when China will also have it own sweeping transfer of personnel at the Eighteenth Party Congress.