"The mutual economic dependence between China and the United States is unprecedented in the history of the world. The advancing globalization brings the two countries many common global problems. Though the United States is the only super power in the world, it is not capable of resolving all the problems alone. China is no doubt one of the most important partners of the United States on those world issues," said Zhou Qi, a senior researcher at the IAS.

In an article by Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, well known for his "soft power" theory, recently published in The New York Times, the scholar said that China is not like the Soviet Union. And the Sino-U.S. relationship is also very different from the U.S.-Soviet relationship during the Cold War. He stressed that China has vast, intricate and growing trade and economic relations with the United States, which are mutually beneficial, but the Soviet Union never had that kind of relationship with the United States. Nye also mentioned that the world's two largest economies have much to gain from cooperation in the fight against climate change, pandemics, cyber-terrorism and nuclear proliferation, among others. So Nye called Washington to work with Beijing rather than contain it.

Tao Wenzhao, a long-time America watcher now with the Center for U.S.-China relations at Tsinghua University, said throughout human history, rising countries might feel repressed by established powers, whereas established powers would look to contain the emerging powers for fear of being overtaken. But under current circumstances, China and the United States are highly interconnected with each other. If conflicts happen between the two, neither could bear the consequences.

And yet for all that, some Chinese scholars insist that a new type of Sino-U.S. relationship relies not mainly on China's goodwill in that there is still a serious lack of mutual strategic trust.

"From the perspective of the United States, it won't trust China even if the latter doesn't seek hegemony. The rising China will unavoidably take more power from the United States, which Washington will be reluctant to see. And then, there will be more and more collisions of interest between the two countries," said Professor Zhu Feng of Peking University.

"If Beijing hopes to build a new type of relationship with Washington, Washington may ask the former to follow its lead in international affairs, guiding and shaping China in the interests of the United States," Zhu said.

Zhao Kejin, Deputy Dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations under Tsinghua University, claims that goodwill is different from reality. To seek a new type of relationship with the United States, China should be fully prepared for conflict.

Despite the fact that Sino-U.S. relations have seen big changes in the last 40 years since former U.S. President Richard Nixon's visit to Beijing, the approaches of Washington's engagement with Beijing often arouse suspicions between the two countries.

Over the short term, a series of protectionist moves directed at China were launched during Obama's first term. Frequent China-bashing during last year's presidential campaign demonstrated the popularity of scapegoating China for domestic woes in the United States.

Most importantly, the United States' bolstering its presence and influence in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes a plan to deploy 60 percent of its warships to the region by 2020, has further inflamed regional tensions.

Recent U.S. meddling in China-Japan affairs justifies such worries. The Diaoyu Islands have been the subject of a sovereignty dispute between China and Japan. In the last days of Hillary Clinton's role as the U.S. secretary of state, she declared not only that the U.S.-Japan Security Pact applies to China's Diaoyu Islands, but that the United States would oppose any unilateral action that would undermine Japan's administration of the islands. This stood in glaring contradiction to her statement that the United States takes no position on the islands' ultimate sovereignty.

Some Chinese observers said such moves show signs that Washington is blindly pursuing national interests at the expense of justice. They say the biggest uncertainty of the future of Sino-U.S. ties lies in the absence of mutual strategic trust. The United States has repeatedly said that its return to Asia is not about taking aim at China and that it welcomes its rise. At the same time, China also repeats that it won't seek hegemony, but rather wants a peaceful rise. Still, somehow both sides often seem to talk past one another.

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