Prior to the departure of United States Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman for China on Saturday, senior US officials said in briefing on her two-day trip that she will tell her Chinese hosts there needs to be a level playing field and guardrails to ensure Sino-US competition does not veer into conflict.

In a statement ahead of her visit, the US State Department said that Sherman's discussions with Chinese diplomats represent ongoing US efforts to hold candid exchanges with China to advance US interests and values, and to responsibly manage the relationship.

However, judging from the report of her discussions with Vice-Foreign Minister Xie Feng in Tianjin on Monday morning provided by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, although she might have said all she was tasked to convey, China is not willing to be lectured by the US on how to manage relations.

According to the Foreign Ministry report, Xie told Sherman that China is willing to maintain healthy and stable relations with the US, but that can only be on the basis of mutual respect, fairness and the basic norms of international relations.

As Xie said, the reason Sino-US relations are in danger of veering into conflict is that some in the US treat China as an imaginary enemy — a combination of Japan before the Pearl Harbor was attacked and the Soviet Union after sending the first human-made satellite into space — and are hijacking the China policy of the US.

The "competition-cooperation-confrontation" trichotomy the Joe Biden administration advocates for the management of the relations with China is nothing but a deceit.

As Xie told Sherman, the Chinese people feel that the real emphasis is on the confrontational aspect, the collaborative aspect is just an expediency and the competitive aspect is a narrative trap.

When the Biden administration needs China, it demands cooperation, and when it comes to the fields where the US is superior to China, it calls for decoupling and sanctions. And in the areas where the US wants to contain China, it leaves no stones unturned in trying to do so — ranging from interfering in China's internal affairs and long-arm jurisdiction to smearing and bullying — irrespective of the consequences.

In the face of the US' coercion, China's countermeasures are legal, rational and necessary to defend its sovereignty and core interests. If the US continues to pursue its current China policy, the most important bilateral relations in the world will descend unrecoverably into a vortex.

Before Washington adopts a new direction for its diplomacy that encompasses common ground, there is no foundation on which to erect guardrails.

Sherman will not return home empty-handed as Xie gave her a list of actions that the US should stop and a list of individual cases that China is concerned about to help the US find a solid foothold on which to move relations forward.