With China's rise to great power status, the United States has a fresh opportunity to seek an equal partnership with China in order to more effectively respond to perceived challenges, threats and dangers, including ameliorating the consequences of global warming, limiting – and eventually eliminating – nuclear weapons, and seeking to circumvent explosive regional wars.

In America's current "pivot to Asia," I believe we should move to include, rather than exclude, all players with "a stake in the game." If, on the other hand, we focus on "containing" or "excluding" China, I feel we run the grave risk of repeating the mistakes we made in our treatment of Russia following the devolution of the Soviet Union when other, more cooperative partnership options existed.

As China's power and role in the world expands, it will be watched – and judged – more critically and not always fairly. China should continue to expand your people-to-people efforts, including encouraging personal vacations, providing educational opportunities, supporting artistic exchanges, etc. The more we all get to know each other as human beings, the less easily will we entertain proposals to harm each other.

China and the United States have the opportunity to demonstrate a new kind of partnership between world powers, one that shatters the failed patterns of the past in which states grow in hostility and misunderstanding.

While not ignoring our differences, we must keep focused on what we have in common: the need to make the future a safer place for all of our children! May we both have the courage to pursue the necessary, hard work of creating the conditions of peace: justice, fairness, and mutual respect. We have everything to gain; if we fail, our children will curse us both!

(The author is a former member of the House of Representatives of Iowa) 

This article is edited and translated from 美国如何获得中国信任与合作, Source: People's Daily