The stage is set, the television lights and internet links ready, and all that matters now is the performer and his audience.

Millions of people want to see how President Barack Obama stands up to public questioning in China, where his personal story is admired and his books are bestsellers. But the United States is viewed by many Chinese with suspicion.

The president is due to step before the cameras in Shanghai tomorrow morning and speak directly with a Chinese audience. On that much American and Chinese schedulers agree.

After that it all gets murky: emblematic of the ambiguities inside the world’s most important bilateral relationship.

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Team Obama calls it “a town hall event”, evoking the freewheeling, unscripted campaign dialogues that helped to take him to the White House.The state media cautiously label it “an exchange activity with Chinese youth”.

Will it be televised live and streamed in real time on the internet, as the White House and Chinese bloggers hope? Or will the country’s leaders decide that the people should see only edited segments ?

Diplomatic sources in Beijing felt that having allowed Bill Clinton to reach out live on his presidential visit, the regime would look insecure if it denied another expert communicator the same chance. Instead, it looks more likely that officials will make sure the audience knows what questions to throw at Obama.

“Everyone knows the audience will be handpicked,” said one Chinese internet user. “It’s a joke.”

Indeed, more than 3,500 “suggested” questions — supposedly from real, spontaneous “netizens” — have appeared on a state media website.

Apart from those soliciting the president’s views on fast food, sport, fashion and the mysteries of human attraction, there are plenty that challenge America’s attitude to a rising power of 1.3 billion people.

Propaganda has stoked the idea that the US covertly wants to stop China taking its place in the sun and is scheming to weaken the economy and curb Beijing’s military power.

Yesterday in Tokyo Obama sought to calm such fears by using his only big speech of a 10-day Asian tour to welcome China on to the world stage and to say that the US did not seek to contain it.

White House officials were keen to highlight these diplomatic statements and the Chinese media made them headline news. There was no coverage for Obama’s ringing declaration, in the same speech, that the US would never waver in speaking up for fundamental values it held dear.

“There are certain aspirations that human beings hold in common,” the president said. “The freedom to speak your mind and choose your leader, the ability to access information and worship how you please, confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice.”

While such words threaten regimes such as those of China, Burma and North Korea the US is feeling its way through the first stages of a new approach to some of the most hard-headed rulers on earth.

Today, for example, Obama will appear alongside Lieutenant-General Thein Sein, the Burmese prime minister, at a summit in Singapore, a tentative step towards engagement with the junta and an opportunity to press for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader, from house arrest.

Realism and rhetoric will be hard to balance.

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