China must stop 'wishful thinking' over relations with US under Biden administration, says expert

Beijing [China], December 3 : A leading Chinese foreign relations expert opined that China must stop 'wishful thinking' about the incoming US President-elect Joe Biden's administration and clearly define the nature of its relationship with the US as a competitor.
Yan Xuetong, Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Beijing's Tsinghua University said there would be an "uneasy peace" in the decade ahead, featuring an increasingly fierce rivalry between the two great powers and hedging policy moves from smaller parties, reported South China Morning Post.
"Unpredictability, uncertainty will still be the basic characteristic of the coming years... The world will definitely become more chaotic," Yan said on Wednesday at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum, China's top international platform for dialogue on defence and security issues.
He further expressed that he was not confident about Biden's China policy, which he said would shift from the trade war into frictions in the political realm without lowering the scale and intensity of clashes between the two nations.
"Biden will take a multilateral approach and the pressure on China will increase rather than decrease... He will take a harder line and invest more resources in these issues, resulting in more serious conflicts," Yan said.
He further said China should reach a consensus with the US that competition was at the core of their relationship, which would give the two powers a common ground for pragmatic discussions on how to manage and prevent it from escalating into war.
South China Morning Post further reported Yan predicting that a lot of international norms will be violated.
The Trump administration has gone through a series of measures aimed at severing economic ties between the United States and China, with little sign of giving up in the last few months.
The two countries have sparred over a range of issues in recent times under Trump's presidency, as China's move to impose national security law in Hong Kong, its human rights violation in Xinjiang and territorial aggression in the South China Sea have all drawn fierce criticism from Washington.