BEIJING — U.S. and Chinese officials clashed publicly on the opening day of strategic economic talks, with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pushing China to revalue its currency while Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi said that Americans do not have a full understanding of the situation.

After standing by quietly as U.S. officials yesterday criticized her country's economic policies in the media during the past week, Wu set the tone for the meeting with strong introductory remarks that spanned 20 typed pages and some 5,000 years of Chinese history.

"Some American friends are not only having limited knowledge of, but harboring much misunderstanding about, the reality in China," Wu said, according to a copy of her remarks provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For example, Wu noted that China needed to create enough jobs to absorb an estimated 300 million rural workers into its urban economy in the coming two decades.

The text was so stuffed with facts and figures that some passages looked as if they came from academic articles.

Paulson was equally aggressive in his follow-up speech, saying that it is the U.S. government's "strong view" that China allow more currency flexibility with the renminbi, or yuan. Most countries allow the value of their currencies to be set in global markets, but China intervenes to keep its currency pegged to the dollar at an exchange rate that many Western economists regard as skewed in China's favor.

The Chinese economy "would be more effective under a regime where currency values are determined in a competitive open marketplace based upon economic fundamentals," Paulson said.

Since January, China has overtaken Mexico as the United States' second-largest trading partner, behind only Canada, the Commerce Department said this week. Total trade so far this year between the countries is valued at $281 billion. While U.S. exports to China are rising sharply, they remain a fraction of Chinese exports to the United States. Between January and October, the value of Chinese goods imported to the United States exceeded the value of U.S. exports to China by $190 billion — more than a quarter of America's goods deficit worldwide for the first 10 months of this year.

As the meetings took place, China set the yuan's daily midpoint at 7.8197 per dollar, a gain of 3.7 percent since its revaluation in the summer of last year.

Throughout the day, U.S. officials continued to push on issues such as trying to resolve the trade imbalance between the two countries and making sure China lives up to commitments it made five years ago when it joined the World Trade Organization. By the afternoon they said they were optimistic that progress was being made.

"They were very much in a receiving mode," Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao said in an interview with reporters. "They were listening very carefully."

Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez said the meeting "exceeded expectations" and that "it was a very candid ... honest solid dialogue."