United States President Barack Obama today said discussions with China about human rights will resume early next year, following international calls for the president to address specific concerns on the issues of press freedom and human rights violations.

At a press conference today with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Obama, Hu said both sides had “accepted to respect the other’s cultural sovereignty,” according to CNN’s reports, and “that all countries should respect each other’s choice of a development model,” according to The China Daily, an English-language, government-run daily.

At a town hall meeting with about 500 selected Chinese students at Shanghai’s Science and Technology Museum on Monday, Obama addressed the importance of a free flow of information. “I’ve always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I’m a big supporter of non-censorship,” Obama said, answering a question related to Internet censorship. However, he also added, “I recognize that different countries have different traditions.”

Ahead of Obama’s arrival in China, activists and dissidents across the country were taken into custody, reportedly to prevent them from meeting with foreign journalists covering the visit.

“While IPI welcomes President Obama’s comments during his trip to China about the universality of human rights and the importance of freedom of expression, we remain deeply concerned about censorship and other press freedom violations in China,” said IPI Deputy Director Alison Bethel McKenzie. “We had hoped that the United States president would have exerted more pressure on China to genuinely re-examine its policy toward the media.”

In a 13 November letter to President Obama ahead of his trip to Asia, IPI called on the American president to raise concern about the numerous press freedom violations that the governments he would be meeting during his official visit have either committed or to which they have turned a blind eye.