Newly elected Chinese President Xi Jinping held telephone talks with his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama on the expansion of cooperation and mutual respect between China and the United States.

Offering his congratulations on Xi's election as Chinese president, Obama said the United States and China have conducted broad and in-depth cooperation over the past four years.

Currently, U.S.-China relations are faced with a historic opportunity to chart a course for future development, said Obama.

The U.S. side hopes to work with China to maintain contacts between the heads of state of the two countries and strengthen communication and dialogue in a bid to promote steady development of bilateral ties and build a new type of inter-power relations, he said.

Obama said the U.S. side is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China through mechanisms such as the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue to accommodate each other's concerns and to promote economic and trade relations. The U.S. side is willing to strengthen cooperation with China to ensure security, stability and prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region, he said.

Xi said China and the United States have enormous common interests, but also differences.

China firmly maintains and promotes the development of China-U.S. relations, and would like to work with the United States in enhancing mutual trust, expanding cooperation, handling differences, and maintaining high-level contacts, Xi said.

He also said the two countries should jointly maintain and promote the sound development of a series of mechanisms, including the Strategic and Economic Dialogue and high-level consultations on humanistic exchanges, boost the development of cooperative partnership, and find a path for new-type of inter-power relations.

On bilateral economic and trade cooperation, Xi said the two sides should adhere to equal dialogue and candid communication, and should prevent politicizing economic and trade issues so as to further consolidate the basis of China-U.S. economic and trade ties that are characterized by mutual benefits and win-win results, which will bring benefits to the two peoples and will produce positive results on global economic development, said Xi.

He emphasized that as long as the two sides follow the spirit of mutual respect, openness and tolerance, China and the United States will be able to achieve more in the Asia-Pacific region and to turn the Pacific into an ocean of peace and cooperation.

Xi and Obama also exchanged views on the situation of the Korean Peninsula, cyber security among other issues. Xi expressed China's principles and positions on those issues.

Xi, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was elected state president of China and chairman of China's Central Military Commission earlier in the day at a plenary meeting of the first session of the 12th National People's Congress, the country's top legislature.

(Xinhua News Agency March 14, 2013)