China and the U.S. are expected to keep their relationship on a "reasonably smooth track" on conclusion of their annual high-level talks this week, a U.S China expert said Friday.
Kenneth Lieberthal, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Xinhua in an interview that, at the talks held under the frameworks of the seventh Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) and sixth High-level Consultation on People-to- People Exchange (CPE) Tuesday and Wednesday, the two sides focused on moving some major issues forward and fundamentally prepared for the planned first state visit to the U.S. by Chinese President Xi Jinping in September.
Lieberthal, former senior director for Asia at the National Security Council under the Clinton administration, believed that the talks "laid out some prospects for how those issues might be tackled" with "deep discussions" on the leading disputes of the South China Sea and cyber security that had strained the China-U. S. ties ahead of the S&ED and the CPE.
"Both sides I think understand each other's positions quite well, and the question is whether they can move this forward to where they can see a path to tamping down tensions between now and September," he said.
He noted that both sides made gestures toward lowering the tensions in order to keep the China-U.S. relationship on track ahead of President Xi's U.S. visit.
"The whole theme on the U.S. side, I thought, from the broad welcoming remarks to other comments that were made was that this is a relationship that should be able to work relatively well," he said.
He was referring to the remarks made at the opening ceremony by top U.S. officials including Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew. Biden praised China for being a "responsible stakeholder" in many ways in recent years by cooperating with the U.S. on tackling a number of regional and global challenges.
Lieberthal emphasized that the two sides could move forward "on the impressively wide array of international issues where we actually cooperate or at least work in parallel tracks from Iran and North Korea to Sudan to Ebola."
However, he cautioned that the two countries will still "have a lot of points of friction too," as they "have in some areas different priorities and certainly different systems and different values."
Based on his experience as a senior official at the White House, Lieberthal said that Xi's state visit to the U.S. will be "an active-forcing event," which could push the two sides to make real progress on the most pressing issues.
"Those meetings, I know from my own experience in government, really drive the top staffs at the highest level, the national security advisor, etc, to try to make progress on the most pressing issues so the summit meeting will go well and you have some positive news coming out of it," he said. "So this it's kind of an active-forcing event, and generally a positive and constructive action-forcing event."
At the S&ED and the CPE talks, both sides pledged to make every effort to turn the September summit between Xi and U.S. President Barack Obama into a big success.
"So on balance, I think the effort will be to keep things on a reasonably smooth track, not to have something really disrupt the relationship between now and then," Lieberthal said.
