The meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and U.S. President Barack Obama in London on Wednesday marks the beginning of a new era in Sino-U.S. relations and the G20 London summit will strengthen China's role on the international stage, Italian scholars said on Thursday.

Luca La Bella, a China expert with Rome's International Studies Center, told Xinhua that "the importance of the bilateral meeting was highlighted by the fact that it was Obama's first institutional trip abroad marking his debut on the international stage."

"It's a turning point in China-U.S. relations," he said.

"Barack Obama puts China on the same level as the United States. The relations today are between equals, different from the(former U.S. President George W.) Bush era when China was being constantly put under pressure to become a world actor," he said.

Silvio Fagiolo, a professor of international relations at LUISS University in Rome and former Italian ambassador to Germany, said "the meeting marked China's global rise and the beginning of a long-lasting strategic relationship with the United States not only at economic level but also at cultural, political and environmental levels and in the fight against terrorism."

"Obama is more pragmatic than Bush ... his strategy is to focus on cooperation and economic priorities," said Fagiolo.

For Stefano Silvestri, a director at the Rome-based International Affairs Institute, "Obama has chosen a different approach based on a greater international and multilateral cooperation."

"For Bush, China was a strategic competitor to keep under control, while the new U.S. president wants to establish a special partnership with Beijing which will strengthen China's global role," he added.

"China and the United States together make up the world's economic engine," said La Bella. "No wonder Europeans were anxious about the outcomes of Thursday's meeting."

"The European Union is the largest economy in the world," he said. "However, economic relations between China and the United States have incredibly grown in the last 15 years. Their economic exchange is greater today than the one between the United States and Europe," La Bella added.

La Bella said the G20 summit "marks a new role for China" and "China is not anymore an emerging country but a stable part of the global economy."

"The financial turmoil originated in the Western world, but Europe has done little to tackle the crisis," he said.

"China has demonstrated great dynamism and ambition with its plan to displace the American dollar as the world's standard and replace it with a global reserve currency operated by the International Monetary Fund, the so-called Special Drawing Right," said Fagiolo.

Fagiolo pointed out that the G20 summit represented a point of change in the hierarchy between nations and marked "the beginning of a new world order where China is to have a greater leading role."