To control and manage are seemingly the top priorities for handling the differences between China and the United States.
Over the past years, both countries have managed to maintain a comprehensively stable relationship despite the increasing number of structural frictions, even confrontations, on the economic and military fronts. In the economic field, the trade imbalance, the renminbi's exchange rate and non-economic factors hindering mutual investment have become major problems. On the military front, Washington remains suspicious of Beijing's strategic developments, more than once challenging the Chinese government's legal reclamation projects in the South China Sea and introduction of the Air Defense Identification Zone over the East China Sea.
And in terms of freedom of navigation and aviation, the US has repeatedly questioned China's sovereignty over its islets and reefs in the East and South China seas.
Many in China believe the increasingly aggressive US government has relinquished its neutrality in the territorial disputes between China and some of its neighbors by backing the Philippines and Japan.
The China-US bilateral cybersecurity dialogue has been stalled for long and the two sides disagree over cross-border anti-terrorism cooperation. Apart from that, Beijing and Washington have also failed to reach agreements on some non-controversial issues, including the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the recent events to mark the 70th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45) and World War II.
Incidentally, it was US Ambassador to China Max Baucus, not President Barack Obama, who attended the commemorative events to mark the end of WWII in which the two countries fought together.
More importantly, their strategic disparities also mirror the structural clashes between a traditional major power and a rising one. For one, some China watchers have made it a habit of misreading, even demonizing, China's reform and opening-up, as new books like the one by former Pentagon adviser Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred Year Marathon, indicate.
Significant changes have taken place since the 2008 global financial crisis. China became the world's second-largest economy in 2010 and, according to some analysts, is on road to replace the US as the leading economy. In this background, New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, a leading think tank, has released a report suggesting China's military and economic rise be controlled.
The two countries differ in terms of social institutions, values and cultures, yet they have strategic frictions because of the changes in their national strengths. But given the importance of their relationship, they should adhere to the principle of "non-confrontation and non-conflict" to manage and control their disparities, especially when third parties (sometimes disruptive) come into play.
Although China has been reiterating that it will never deviate from the path of peaceful rise, some countries are not convinced. On the one hand, agreements have been reached on the Iranian and Korean Peninsula nuclear issues, and joint efforts made to fight pirates and control epidemics such as the Ebola outbreak, as well as to overcome the global financial crisis and tackle climate change. On the other hand, some regional players, including Japan and the Philippines, have sought to challenge China's territorial claims in the East China and South China seas, and provoked tensions to solicit US intervention.
The fact remains that, avoiding disagreements will, in the long term, benefit not only Beijing and Washington, but also the Asia-Pacific region as a whole. Therefore, Beijing and Washington have to build and strengthen mutual strategic trust, and the US should fully respect China's core interests.
Besides, an improved mechanism for preventing crisis and establishing instant communication is needed to defuse combustible events. And most importantly, the two countries should be wary of all third parties, and prevent potential troublemakers from undermining the most important bilateral relationship in the world.
The author, Fu Mengzi, is vice-president of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.
