Managing disagreements important in China-US relations: experts

Managing disagreements is important in maintaining and developing China-US relations, Chinese and American experts said in Beijing on Thursday.

They were in Beijing attending a seminar, which focused on charting the course of the bilateral relations. The seminar was co-hosted by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations and the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration.

The challenge for the relationship is to avoid conflict and to manage friction, with China being the world's largest rising power and the US the world's dominant power, said Jeffrey Bader, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

"The relationship will never be smooth and easy, but it will be characterized by management of friction," said the former special assistant to the president of the United States for national security affairs.

President Xi Jinping's visit to the US in September "did a lot to strengthen the US-China relationship and to build a kind of a safety net under the relationship", Bader said.

The agreements the two countries reached during the visit, such as on cyber security, military-to-military communication, confidence building measures, climate change and trade and investment, "demonstrated to the public on both sides that the relationship is working and is in the interests of both sides", he said.

The interests of the two countries are complimentary, fundamentally, and the two should keep disagreements within the realm of rationality instead of exaggerating or overstating them, Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on US-China Relations said, commenting on the issue of the South China Sea.

Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said: "The South China Sea issue, in my view, is something that needs to be managed. We are not going to solve this issue overnight."

The code of safe conduct agreed between the Chinese and US militaries for naval and air encounters helped manage the issue, said Yuan Peng, vice-president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

"It's a new type of military relationship where we admit there is competition and conflicts between us, but ensure that the competition and conflicts do not develop out of control," he said.

Both Chinese and US militaries showed restraint in an Oct 27 incident in the South China Sea, when a US destroyer entered into waters close to China's Zhubi Reef, said Da Wei, director of the Institute of American Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

The incident didn't affect cooperation in other areas, he said, citing the fact that the commander of the Chinese navy talked to the chief of US Naval Operations two days after the incident, and a Chinese fleet visited the US East Coast on Nov 3.

China and the US won't stop cooperation just because friction exists between them, but there should be a line to prevent this friction from developing into crises, he added.