Cui: China ready to improve US relations before election

"Alarmingly, there are attempts now to negate what has been built up so painstakingly by generations of Chinese and Americans over the decades and to deliberately push our two countries into conflict and confrontation," Cui said.

"I hope people will not try to negate all this and let the relationship go down a very dangerous path," he added.

The Chinese ambassador said none of the major international crises in the 21st century — the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, the global financial crisis of 2008, and the current COVID-19 pandemic — could be resolved with the toolbox of great-power competition, as they are all of a strategic nature.

"It is natural for major countries to have differences and even competition, but they do not justify confrontation," Cui said. "Stigmatization will not make anybody great. Ideological crusades will not solve any problem in today's world and are doomed to fail."

He warned that it is "nothing but wishful thinking" to believe that stoking confrontation could slow down and contain China's development and even bring about a regime change, as history has proved repeatedly that external pressure will only make China stronger and lead to greater unity of its people.

For those who like the term "Cold War" and those bolstered by their victory in the Cold War, Cui cautioned that they should not forget the price the world paid for it over four decades.

In particular, he pointed out that the United States and other countries paid bitter costs in the two hot wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, fought during the Cold War.

"If the negative trend of China-US relations is allowed to continue, China might have to face more difficulties and challenges. But the initiators of the so-called ‘New Cold War' must weigh the costs they have to pay and the consequences for the world," he said. "For whom the bell tolls, there will be a day of reckoning."

Cui said the US has to make a "fundamental choice" — whether getting ready to work with China and other countries to ensure the international order and global system meets the needs of the entire world — or instead remain obsessed with a zero-sum game and major-power competition and let the situation spiral out of control and fall into the "Thucydides Trap".

"I just hope that they will free themselves from the panic and paranoid, which is costing them common sense in such a shocking way," Cui said.

Instead, people from all walks of life in China and the US should stay guarded against "vicious" attempts to push the bilateral relationship to confrontation and conflict, resist any resurgence of McCarthyism, and expand two-way exchanges and cooperation to get the China-US relationship back on the right track, he concluded.