Chinese vice president to wrap up American visit in LA

• Vice President Xi Jinping is expected to become China's next paramount leader
• He has been in the United States since Monday, meeting officials and ordinary Americans
• Xi is scheduled to attend a meeting of U.S. governors in Los Angeles on Friday
• The L.A. mayor says Xi will also attend a Lakers game with him

(CNN) -- Xi Jinping, China's presumptive leader, is due to wrap up his five-day visit to the United States on Friday, meeting with U.S. governors and maybe even squeezing in a basketball game.

During the past few days, Vice President Xi has met with a variety of American citizens, from President Barack Obama and congressional leaders in Washington to Iowa farmers.

In talks with U.S. officials, Xi, who is expected to become president of China next year, has focused issues like trade, investment and agriculture.

His trip has also been punctuated by rights activists holding demonstrations in the vicinity of his official engagements. They have raised more sensitive subjects that the Chinese authorities generally prefer to play down, like China's treatment of its restive Tibetan population.

Xi arrived in Los Angeles on Thursday after leaving Iowa. He was greeted by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Gov. Jerry Brown of California.

The group visited the port of Los Angeles, the busiest by volume in the United States, underling the importance of trade between California and China, which amounted to nearly $150 billion last year.

Despite the feverish attention directed at the New York Knicks' Asian-American star Jeremy Lin, Xi will be watching Kobe Bryant's Los Angeles Lakers on Friday, according to Villaraigosa.

"I said, 'Look, we've got to work hard, but you've got to come and see the Lakers, they're America's team,' " said Villaraigosa.

"He's a Kobe fan and Laker fan, so it all works," the mayor said with a smile.

Along with Vice President Joe Biden, Xi will also meet Friday with U.S. governors and Chinese provincial officials in an event organized by Brown.

His engagements on the West Coast come after talks with Obama on Tuesday in which the U.S. president set a firm tone for future relations between the two world powers.

At the Oval Office meeting, Obama said that with China's meteoric rise as an economic powerhouse came a responsibility to ensure balanced trade flows, referring to China's trade surpluses.

The president also raised the delicate issue of human rights as a critical area of concern for the United States.

Xi's choreographed trip to Washington was meant to burnish his credentials and provide his American counterparts a chance to size him up. President Hu Jintao made a similar visit 10 years ago as he was being groomed for China's top job.

At a U.S.-China Business Council event in Washington on Wednesday, Xi said relations between the two world powers were "at a new historical starting point at this second decade of the 21st century."

"We need to make important efforts toward mutual understanding and strategic trust," Xi said. He defended Chinese economic policies that have been labeled unfair by the U.S. government.

Later Wednesday, he moved from talking about the future to reengaging with his past.

As a young Hebei province official in 1985, Xi led a delegation to the heartland state so that the Chinese could learn about agricultural practices. On that trip, he stayed in an ordinary American home and made friends with people who were as different from him as the ideologies that separated their nations.

He never forgot the hospitality and made it a point to take time on his five-day tour of the United States to stop in Muscatine, a small city of fewer than 25,000 people.

Xi returned Wednesday to the elegant Victorian home of Roger and Sarah Lande, where he had dined 27 years ago. He was greeted by a chorus of "welcomes," a few even in well-practiced Mandarin.

In front of a raging fire, Xi settled on a cream-colored couch in the Lande living room. Later, at a state dinner in Des Moines, he thanked the 17 Iowans he met on his inaugural trip to America at a time when the Cold War still permeated American life.

"It is such a joy to meet you again," Xi said. "There is a tremendous reservoir of goodwill between the Chinese and American people and we each take great interest in the other."

Gov. Terry Branstad said Iowans were pleased to have befriended a man who has risen to such great prominence.

Branstad, who was serving his first term as governor during Xi's maiden visit, recognized the diplomatic milestone that had been marked back then. He also recognized the deeper significance of the visit.

Corn processing is what brought Xi to Iowa in 1985. Now, as he eyes the job of leading the world's biggest buyer of commodities, he was back again to rub shoulders with America, the world's largest corn exporter, in the state that leads production.

CNN's Jethro Mullen, Miguel Marquez and Moni Basu contributed to this report.