Fifteen years from now, when wonky biographies are being written about Tim Geithner's legacy, I hope somebody writes Geithner Goes to China: How a Study-Abroad Trip Changed History. Geithner Goes to China will be the kind of pop-bio that makes much ado of very little, in this case the few months that Geithner spent in a pre-Tiananmen Beijing. He was among the first Dartmouth students to study in Beijing, a city he returned to yesterday as Treasury Secretary. There, he made a speech that Geithner Goes to China will herald as a preview of Geithner's China legacy.

The speech had two meaty excerpts sandwiched on both sides by fluff. There was the usual boilerplate of working together in a new global economy, the progress that's already been made between the United States and China and the progress that will be made, and the obligatory prodding on climate change. But there was a curious passage tucked into the middle of the speech that hints at Geithner's larger vision for the global economy:

In the United States, saving rates will have to increase, and the purchases of U.S. consumers cannot be as dominant a driver of growth as they have been in the past.

In China, as your leadership has recognized, growth that is sustainable growth will require a very substantial shift from external to domestic demand, from an investment and export intensive driven growth, to growth led by consumption. Strengthening domestic demand will also strengthen China's ability to weather fluctuations in global supply and demand.

Intriguingly, Geithner is sketching the United States and China as two polar extremes along the same economic spectrum. The United States saves too little; China saves too much. The U.S. consumes too much; China consumes too little. Geithner thinks it best if both countries learned from one another. (There's that study-abroad influence.) But he's obviously not asking for the countries to switch places—the United States, especially, isn't exactly migrating away from a place of stability. Channeling Obama, he's asking us to meet in the middle.

The other item of note is the delicate phraseology around China's monetary issues. Geithner-obsessives will remember that he had run into some trouble in this arena. First he caused a stir when he said that China was "manipulating" its currency during his confirmation process. China didn't like that. Then he intimated that he was open to a global currency that would replace the dollar as the financial standard. China did like that. Then Geithner made clear that he didn't mean what he said and that he didn't support a new global currency, seeing as how that would make the dollar weaker. China wasn't appreciative.

And so in yesterday's speech, Geithner was on now-familiar eggshells. First, he got euphemistic about China's domestic currency: