BEIJING — President Sarkozy of France began his first state visit to China yesterday with calls for more balanced trade and environmentally sustainable development.

Mr. Sarkozy’s three-day visit was expected to focus on economic ties with China while playing down human-rights concerns that would be sure to receive a cool reception from Beijing.

However, at a dinner yesterday with President Hu, Mr. Sarkozy gently urged China to apply the death penalty less frequently, the French presidential Élysée palace said. “I am not asking for it to be abolished completely, but to accentuate the tendency that is taking shape quite naturally,” the Élysée quoted the French leader as saying.

Mr. Hu responded that he hoped “to have things evolve” in such a way as to “reduce the number of cases in which the death penalty is applied,” the Élysée said.

The French leader also asked for freedom for journalists working in China, it said. Mr. Hu did not make any precise pledge in response, it said. A Paris-based advocacy group, Reporters Without Borders, had earlier appealed to Mr. Sarkozy to raise the cases of 33 journalists and 50 cyber-dissidents imprisoned in China.

Mr. Sarkozy said after the meeting that he had also urged Mr. Hu to “engage vigorously” in finding a solution to the crisis in neighboring Burma, where the ruling junta violently suppressed pro-democracy protests in September.

“If there is a country that can change” things on the ground in Burma, “it’s obviously China,” he said. The Élysée compared the Sarkozy-Hu meeting to a “nice ping pong” game, with the leaders politely batting ideas back and forth.

Earlier, Mr. Sarkozy addressed another touchy issue: complaints that China’s currency, the yuan, was undervalued, making Chinese products unfairly cheap and boosting its trade surplus with France and the rest of Europe.

“A great country must have a strong currency,” Mr. Sarkozy told Chinese and French business leaders in a speech at a Beijing hotel. He called for a “fair balance between the major currencies — the dollar, the euro, the yen, or the yuan.”

“China has an important role to play, in consultation with the other players, in not letting imbalances accumulate to a point where we won’t know how to get out of them,” Mr. Sarkozy said.

He also warned of the costs of China’s five consecutive years of double-digit economic growth, saying that development must not deplete natural resources or accelerate global warming.

Mr. Sarkozy’s arrival in Beijing was preceded by a brief trip to the former imperial capital of Xi’an in western China. He will fly to Shanghai tomorrow before leaving for Paris that night.