China, US advised to refresh ties

In his speech, Stephen S. Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and former chief economist at Morgan Stanley, said the US-China relationship remains the major risk factor in the global economic outlook for 2021.

He suggested the two countries rethink the nature of the dialogue between them and set up a full-time office that addresses all aspects of their relationship on a permanent basis.

In terms of the resolution of trade disputes between China and the US, Roach said Washington needs to look at its trade imbalances in the context that it has a major shortfall of domestic savings.

"So the savings solution needs to be thought of on a medium to longer term basis, not something immediately, but commitment to saving more is the only effective macroeconomic strategy that we can employ to alleviate our enormous and destabilizing multilateral trade imbalance issue," he added.

In resolving difficulties in the US-China relationship, Roach suggested shifting the focus of the economic and trade conflict away from bilateral trade to structural considerations.

"There's no quick fix to defusing the conflict that has emerged, but I think if we take small steps and began to demonstrate a commitment to conflict resolution rather than conflict escalation, we have a real opportunity as America changes leadership to move from a climate of distrust to a climate that now takes us back to a more trusting relationship between us," Roach said.

Da Wei, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, stressed the importance of "sustainable" and "effective" dialogues in improving China-US relations, and said the two countries need to establish some kind of mechanism to stabilize their ties.

He said there are elements of competition in China-US ties, but he didn't think "the old-style Soviet-US Cold War competition" remains in relations between Beijing and Washington. There are broad fields in which China and the US can cooperate with each other, he said.