President Barack Obama's administration will tell top-level Chinese officials at the Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington that the role of consumption as a major driver of the US economy is diminishing.

"There's been a fundamental change in the US economy," a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity at a briefing on the two-day talks to open Monday.

The US economy, which is grappling with a brutal recession that began in December 2007, will recover, the official said, but the recovery "is going to be a different type of recovery."

"US households are raising their savings rates, so this is going to a less consumption-led recovery than what they're used to," he said.

"And our message to the Chinese is going to be: If you want to achieve your growth objectives, you're going to have to find a different way of doing it than through export-led growth," he said.

The official said that US officials will discuss what China needs to do to restructure, saying China is making progress but "not fast enough, not intense enough" in transforming its economic model away from dependence on exports and capital- and resource-intensive heavy industry.

"It's not as simple as putting in place a stimulus bridging over a couple of years until you get back to the old days where you can export into a consumption boom in the US and other parts of the global economy," the official added.

The ballooning US trade gap with China, the country's second-largest trading partner, swelled to an all-time high of 266.3 billion dollars in 2008. US critics accuse Beijing of keeping its yuan currency artificially low to gain a trade advantage.

Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao said they would launch the Strategic and Economic Dialogue at the Group of 20 London summit in April as a way of strengthening relationships between the two countries.

Obama will address the opening Monday of the discussions, the first such bilateral high-level talks since he took office in January.

The two-track talks -- economic and strategic -- are a broader extension of economic talks started under the previous US administration of George W. Bush.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will be joined by their respective Chinese co-chairs, State Councillor Dai Bingguo and Vice Premier Wang Qishan.

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