SHANGHAI, November 24. /TASS/. China and the US have stabilized their bilateral relations, but there are still many pitfalls due to unresolved structural differences, said Wang Wen, a senior faculty member at the People's University of China.
The executive dean at the university’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Wang Wen made these comments on the sidelines of the World Conference on China Studies in Shanghai on Friday.
"I think Chinese wisdom has played a role in China and the US being able to come to the negotiating table to resolve issues in the sliding bilateral relationship. It is also the result of China's courage in confronting the US. The US has also fully realized that it can no longer irritate or insult China and interfere in China's affairs," the analyst said.
He suggested that one of the main things to come out of the recent summit between the Chinese and US leaders in San Francisco was that the two sides halted the "downward slide" in bilateral relations and stabilized them.
"One can predict that in the future - for about a year or a year and a half - relations will generally be stable until we face some critical situation," he said.
He added that pitfalls still remain. First and foremost, Wang Wen said, the issue at stake is that key structural differences in the relations between the two countries have not been resolved.
"The biggest structural contradiction is that the US, as a hegemon country, wants to suppress China's ascent," the analyst said.
Among the unresolved issues, he named Taiwan, the trade war, Xinjiang and some others.
Wang Wen said he believes that the US has a lot of internal problems, such as racial discrimination, gun violence and many others.
"It is quite possible that the United States will be divided, especially if [Donald] Trump wins the election in 2024. I think the US could be divided, so on a certain level, I guess time is still on China's side," the analyst said.
US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a meeting in the suburbs of San Francisco on November 15. It was the seventh time the two leaders had spoken since Biden took office as president, but only the second time they had met face-to-face. It was also Xi Jinping's first visit to the United States in the past six years. The previous face-to-face meeting between Biden and Xi Jinping took place on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia in November 2022.