The first meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and his US counterpart Barack Obama in London was a wide-ranging session that bodes well for the future, a leading American scholar on China-US relations said on Wednesday.

"The two sides agreed to cooperate in a set of areas and they characterized US-China relationship as positive, cooperative and comprehensive going forward. So I would overall say that it appears to be a big meeting," said Kenneth Lieberthal, a political science professor at the University of Michigan.

The first face-to-face meeting between Hu and Obama was wide-ranging, basically forward-looking, Lieberthal, also a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a leading think tank based in Washington, D.C., told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

Hu and Obama met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in London.

Lieberthal noted that the two leaders covered a broad range of issues in a relatively brief meeting, including energy security, military-to-military relations, domestic economic policies and approaches to restructuring the global financial system and dealing with the economic crisis.

The scholar said the establishment of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue mechanism and the announcement of an Obama visitto China later this year were also among the major achievements of the meeting.

Substantial attention to clean energy and climate change also received a separate paragraph in a statement issued by the White House, the scholar added.

Lieberthal said the meeting was of great significance for the future of the US-China bilateral relationship and the world in three aspects.

He said that the meeting, in the first place, started a relationship whose quality, mutual trust and dynamism will have an impact on both countries and more broadly.