It’s not even a debatable point any more: This is China’s century. Everything about the country is outsized — the growth of its economy and its trade surplus, its demand for fossil fuels, and the way it angers and confuses U.S. politicians.

Two news stories from the past week underscore the significance of China’s influence in both the global economy and in U.S. affairs. Each event also suggests that relations between China and the United States are becoming increasingly routine and ordinary.

At the same time, each leaves a taste of wonder about the degree to which Americans understand and appreciate China as a force to be reckoned with.

First came the report that Beijing Vantone Real Estate Co. had signed a 23-year lease at New York’s Freedom Tower, the 1,776-foot edifice rising on the site of the destroyed World Trade Center. The company plans a 190,000-square-foot business center to assist other Chinese enterprises seeking American opportunities. What’s notable is that the China business center is the first private tenant for this iconic monument. All the others so far are government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

Then, Harvard University announced it has opened an office in Shanghai and will also open a second in Beijing later this year to assist students and faculty in their research and teaching activities and to otherwise broaden the university’s connections to China. The offices will be operated jointly by the Harvard Business School, which will maintain a researcher there, and the Harvard China Fund, established in 2006 to broaden the university’s connections to the country.

Together, these two developments suggest the Chinese have an increasingly advanced understanding of how to do business in the United States, and we are just starting to figure them out.

That same tentativeness is evident in U.S.-China political relations, particularly when the subject turns to the oft-debated concern over China’s currency policy. This issue, as much as any other, is a sore point because China’s intentionally weak currency, the yuan, is regarded as central to its export-driven economy.

It has been almost three years since China agreed to allow the value of the yuan to rise. But the change has been managed, and China doesn’t allow the yuan to trade freely on global markets alongside the dollar, the euro and the yen.

Regardless, the yuan has appreciated almost 21 percent against the dollar since the lid came off in July 2005. And in the past year, the U.S. trade balance with China appears to have stabilized. That’s probably a result of both the yuan’s climb against the dollar as well as the slowing U.S. economy.

Through April of this year, the United States had a deficit in goods trade with China of $75 billion. While that’s almost equal to the U.S. shortfall in merchandise trade with Canada, Japan and Mexico combined — the next three large deficit countries — it’s also a tiny bit less than it was a year ago. Both exports to China and shipments from there have grown in the past year, but exports have grown more. And last year China surpassed Japan as the No. 3 destination for U.S.-made goods.

Yet, for many economists, and many U.S. politicians, progress has been too slow.

Lawmakers from both parties continue to talk about legislating some form of trade punishment if the Chinese don’t permit the yuan to rise further and faster. Economists, on the other hand, tend to see proposals to brand China as a “currency manipulator” and to impose tariffs on Chinese-made goods as counterproductive. They want U.S. and international officials to keep up the verbal pressure, however, and are disappointed when the United States seems to slack off.

But letting up is exactly what the United States seems to be doing. When Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. met with China’s Vice Premier Wang Qishan last month in Annapolis, Md., as part of a continuing series of bilateral economic discussions, energy, environmental and investment issues dominated the agenda. The subject of currencies was relegated to a single, boilerplate sentence at the end of Paulson’s closing remarks.

And even when U.S. officials press the case on the Chinese currency, they pursue too narrow an attack. By concentrating on the yuan’s value relative to the dollar, U.S. officials give China latitude to keep the currency weak relative to the euro. And as the dollar has fallen against the euro, so has the yuan, putting pressure on European companies and undermining what many economists say should have been a shared goal of industrialized countries to push the yuan higher.

In other words, the currency debate is missing an important global perspective, especially among U.S. officials. To be sure, it’s still possible that President Bush, as he meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Japan this week at the Group of Eight summit, will show us otherwise.

If not, he’ll just have to rely on those at the Harvard Business School, his alma mater, to bring that perspective to the discussions.

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