AFP WASHINGTON REPUBLICAN Mitt Romney dragged delicate US-China ties into explosive campaign politics on Thursday, branding President Barack Obama a “supplicant” to a “prosperous tyranny” eyeing Asian hegemony.

The attack by the Republican presidential hopeful came as Obama’s administration offers a tough love welcome to China’s presumed new leader Xi Jinping, at a critical moment in the power politics of both nations.

“The sum total of my approach will ensure that this is an American, not a Chinese century,” Romney wrote in an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal.

“We should not fail to recognise that a China that is a prosperous tyranny will increasingly pose problems for us, its neighbours and the entire world,” Romney wrote.

“We must... make (China’s) path to regional hegemony far more costly than the alternative path of becoming a responsible partner in the international system,” he said, apparently auguring a new tougher stand if he is elected in November.

Romney also described Obama’s elaborate meetings in the Oval Office this week with Xi as “empty pomp and ceremony.” He also accused Obama of entering office “as a near supplicant to Beijing, almost begging it to continue buying American debt.” And the former Massachusetts governor again vowed to brand China a currency manipulator on his first day in the White House and to reverse what he said was Washington’s current “trade surrender” to Beijing.