The last time President Barack Obama went to China, five years ago, he was a political supernova from a nation with a depleted, debt-ridden economy. When he returns to Beijing on Monday, he will be a political casualty from a country with a resurgent economy.
White House officials hope the later distinction will outweigh the earlier one when Obama meets with President Xi Jinping before traveling on to Myanmar and Australia. But they are likely to be disappointed: China, analysts say, is likely to dwell more on Obama's electoral reversals than on the comparatively robust American recovery.
"Politics trumps economics, at the end of the day," said Nicholas R. Lardy, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
That is not to understate the shift in economic fortunes between China and the United States since 2009. At that time, in the depths of the financial crisis, visiting Americans were lectured by Chinese officials about the need for the United States to put its fiscal house in order. Now, Obama has cut the deficit in half while the Chinese economy is the one slowing sharply, weighed down by a sea of bad loans.
But Lardy said the Chinese economy was not as troubled as some in Washington believe. The government, he said, was orchestrating a slowdown in growth to squeeze out excesses in housing and other markets - a difficult process that he said Beijing was managing fairly well.
Obama, meanwhile, has been preoccupied by other crises, from the Ebola outbreak to the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The Republican takeover of the Senate has added to doubts that the president will have either the time or the political influence to push forward his much-promoted strategic pivot to Asia.
China's state media has been unforgiving about Obama's political travails.
"Obama always utters 'Yes, we can,' which led to the high expectations people had for him," The Global Times, an English-language website affiliated with the People's Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, said in a postelection editorial. "But he has done an insipid job, offering nearly nothing to his supporters. U.S. society has grown tired of his banality."
The timing of the editorial, just a few days before Obama's arrival in Beijing, was unusual. But it reflects a broader nationalist strain in China, embodied by Xi, who has consolidated his power and displayed few signs of conciliation toward Obama on thorny issues like Chinese cyberattacks on U.S. companies.
Obama's best bet to counter doubts about his standing, analysts said, will be to move quickly on projects that reinforce America's presence in the region, like a proposed trade deal, and in areas where China and the United States can work together, like climate change.
"It's a matter of, in part, communicating through your body language, through your ambitions, and through what you commit to," said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China adviser in the Clinton administration who is now at the Brookings Institution. "That's an important part of what he'll do, but I certainly think that the election does not help him in that."
One of the areas where a Republican-controlled Congress might actually help rather than hinder Obama is in passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious trade pact involving 12 countries that is a centerpiece of the president's pivot to Asia.
Negotiations for a deal have bogged down in the last year, in part because Japan and other Asian countries are reluctant to make big concessions without knowing whether Obama will have "fast-track" authority to pass a treaty in Congress. The White House held off asking for such authority before the midterm elections, at the request of Democrats.
Now, though, a free-trade-friendly Congress is more likely to grant Obama fast-track authority. That could give the administration a genuine window to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2015 before the next presidential election. While in Beijing, Obama is expected to meet with leaders of the countries involved in the negotiation. They will be there for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, an annual meeting of Pacific Rim countries being held in China.
The U.S. trade representative, Michael B. Froman, has played down expectations for any breakthrough in Beijing. And China, which has not been invited to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, will be watching the U.S. efforts with some skepticism.
Still, Xi and Obama could find common ground on climate change. As the world's two largest carbon emitters, China and the United States are trying to develop a common position on new targets for emissions reductions in advance of climate talks in Paris next year. The thinking is that they could then pull the rest of the world into a treaty.
While the Chinese may view Obama as a diminished figure, analysts say they are well aware that his successor - whether Hillary Rodham Clinton or a Republican - could end up taking a tougher line toward China. That means they will keep looking for ways to work with him.
Administration officials reject the contention that Obama's focus on Asia has been impeded by events elsewhere in the world. Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, noted that it was his second visit to the region this year - a "substantial investment of time and attention," she said, given "all the issues that we are all facing."
On the eve of the trip, the White House got good news from unlikely sources: Japan and China, which agreed to set aside a longstanding dispute over islands in the East China Sea. The United States has fretted about being drawn into an increasingly dangerous confrontation.
"The tensions between Japan and China have been overshadowing the whole region, and the relationship between the United States and China," said Jeffrey A. Bader, a former China adviser to Obama. "When relations between China and its neighbors are stable, that helps us."
