US first lady Michelle Obama will kick off her China trip on Wednesday with her daughters Malia and Sasha, and her mother, Marian Robinson. This is the first time for the first lady to visit China, and she will meet her Chinese counterpart Peng Liyuan.

The eight-day trip, according to her office, will be built on the theme of education. Obama will discuss the importance of education in the lives of both the US and China and she will "talk to young people about the power of education to help them achieve their aspirations." And she will also discuss other "soft" issues like environment and medical issues where China and the US do not have big divergences.

It's an opportunity to enhance mutual understanding among the public, however, the trip in which sensitive political topics are excluded has been criticized by some US media and scholars.

Some US commentators advocate that Obama should seize the opportunity to do more, for example raise the issues of human rights, the recent visa denials for US journalists and greater access within China for US movies. They even compare Obama unfavorably with former first lady Hillary Clinton, who boldly called on China to improve its human rights conditions when she addressed the audience in Beijing at the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women.

But previous first ladies in Beijing, such as Pat Nixon on her husband's groundbreaking visit in 1972, stuck strictly to non-political topics even at times of high tension.

Elsewhere, former US first lady Laura Bush commented on local elections in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan when she visited the Middle East for the first time and she also criticized the democratization of Arabian countries, which led to protests against her when she was in Jerusalem in 2005.

If the US first lady stands out to make a stir over sensitive political topics in China, this will only jeopardize the significance of the trip, which is supposed to promote cultural communication as the main objective of public diplomacy and affect her image among the public.

As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. A confrontational approach on the visit would only lead to a round of complaints from the Chinese. As a guest, it's better to concentrate on points of mutual cooperation.

Obama has previously focused on issues such as national health and children's literacy in her role as first lady domestically, so it would be strange for her to switch away from these topics to more controversial ones just to appease the usual China-bashers.

The Chinese hope to see an amicable US first lady to enhance mutual understanding of both countries, not a politician advocating the US values and pointing fingers at China. Let's hope the first lady is wise enough not to be affected by those "political" hopes placed on her by some US commentators and media.

Zhu Wei, a civil servant based in Beijing