Liu said China and the United States were attempting to “break the historical pattern” of conflict and confrontation when new, rising powers encounter entrenched powers. That aim was a point of broad agreement when U.S. President Barack Obama hosted a summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Sunnylands, California, in June and is now a mainstay of Chinese commentary on relations with the United States.

Citing growing interdependence, shared interests and the advent of a connected “global village,” Liu asserted that “times have changed” from when existing and rising powers clashed in the past. She said the tenets of this “new model” of major-power relations are avoiding conflict, mutual respect and “win-win cooperation.” The vice premier, who has held numerous Party posts and is a member of its Politburo also stated that the two countries should “respect each other’s choice of social system” and national interests.

Liu gave nongovernmental exchanges a central place in the construction of a growing relationship between the two countries. “State-to-state relations, in the final analysis, are about relations between the peoples,” she said. “Amity between peoples holds the key to friendships between states.”

Liu was the first senior Chinese official to visit Washington since the conclusion on November 12 of a path-breaking Communist Party meeting in Beijing—the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee. Under Xi’s leadership, the meeting produced a package of significant social, economic and legal reforms that, while maintaining firm Communist Party control, point to an expanded role for market forces and rule of law. The reforms announced include an easing of China’s “one-child” policy, the closing of its labor camps and moves to increase judicial independence, rural property rights and the rights of internal migrants to relocate to cities, as well as plans to use markets to set prices on several basic commodities and utility services.

Liu said the overall goal was to create a system that is more democratic, law-based and better able to meet the needs of 1.3 billion Chinese people. China needs to create 12 million jobs every year, she said.

While conceding that reform remained “a daunting task,” Liu used her USIP address to outline the Party’s “sweeping and profound” initiative, which includes 300 specific reform measures. She called its shift on the role of markets—from playing a “basic” role in allocating resources to a “decisive” one—a “major theoretical breakthrough.” At the same time, China’s government will take new steps to “make up for market failures.”

Liu’s appearance at the Institute was hosted by the Schwarzman Scholars program, Tsinghua University in Beijing and USIP. The Schwarzman Scholars is modeled on the Rhodes Scholarships; it will include a college now being constructed at Tsinghua and was started by financier-philanthropist Stephen Schwarzman, who described the program at the USIP event.

Liu noted that 235,000 Chinese students are already studying in the United States and 68,000 Americans study in China—numbers that are expected to grow.

Earlier in the day, Liu met with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at the State Department for this year’s round of the U.S.-China High Level Consultation on People-to-People Exchange, or CPE. The CPE is intended to foster people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States with a focus on five areas: education, culture, science and technology, women’s issues and sports. Said Kerry, “We’re going to continue to work hard, in order to give more people the opportunity to be able to build their own understanding through people-to-people exchanges. There just isn’t anything more valuable.”

The November 21 CPE meeting was the fourth of such gatherings, a process that runs in parallel with the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. “The Chinese and American peoples want a strong, cooperative relationship,” Obama said in a letter to the CPE participants. “And it is in our interest to work together to meet the global challenges that we face.”

Over several years, USIP has helped convene dialogue efforts with Chinese participants on issues of peace, security and the breadth of the bilateral relationship. In August, USIP and the Chinese Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) co-hosted a “Track 2” dialogue that assessed the development of bilateral people-to-people exchanges.

Separately, in June, USIP President Jim Marshall led U.S. delegations to two “Track 1.5” dialogue sessions in Beijing. The first was the fifth meeting of the U.S.-China Project on Crisis Avoidance and Cooperation, which included a CICIR-led Chinese delegation. The other was the second meeting of the U.S.-China-Japan Track 1.5 Dialogue on Risk Reduction and Crisis Prevention, known as R2CP and organized with CICIR and a Japanese delegation led by the Institute for International Policy Studies.

USIP’s Track 1.5 diplomacy involves policy exchanges among current and former policymakers, military officers and policy experts. Track 1 diplomacy typically involves high-level government and military representatives participating in official negotiations. Track 2 dialogues involve only non-governmental representatives who meet to build relationships and formulate recommendations and ideas for consideration by officials engaged in a formal diplomatic process.

“With tensions remaining high in the Asia-Pacific region–especially in the East and South China Seas and on the Korean Peninsula–such dialogues provide important ways to discuss threats and decrease the possibility of miscalculations that could lead to conflict,” said Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, director of USIP’s Asia-Pacific Program.

The USIP dialogue efforts involving China will continue, she said.

Explore further

• USIP's Jim Marshall led U.S. delegations to Track 1.5 dialogues in Beijing.
• Follow USIP’s Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt on Twitter @ska_kongshan
• The Institute last year co-hosted "The Week That Changed The World," a symposium marking 40 years since President Nixon’s breakthrough China trip.