The China-U.S. relationship is in a stalemate, fundamentally because some Americans portray China as an "imagined enemy," said Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng, urging the United States to change its highly misguided mindset and dangerous policy.

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Xie made the remarks on Monday during talks with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who is on a visit to Tianjin City from July 25 to 26.

For quite some time, when talking about conflict with China and challenges facing the United States, the "Pearl Harbor moment" and the "Sputnik moment" have been brought up by some Americans, Xie said.

Some international scholars, including some U.S. academics, perceive this as comparing China to Japan in the Second World War and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It seems as if by making China an "imagined enemy," a national sense of purpose would be reignited in the United States.

The hope may be that by demonizing China, the United States could somehow shift domestic public discontent over political, economic and social issues and blame China for its own structural problems, he said.

It seems that a whole-of-government and whole-of-society campaign is being waged to bring China down. It is as if when China's development is contained, all U.S. domestic and external challenges would go away, and America would become great again and Pax Americana would continue to go on, Xie said.

Currently, Washington and its allies are attempting to disguise "the law of the jungle" within a rules-based international order. "The United States has abandoned universally recognized international norms and damaged the international system it helped build," the diplomat said.