Thursday will see the first high-level meeting between leading Chinese and U.S. officials since Joe Biden became president. Zhao Hai, a research fellow from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says he's positive about the meeting despite all the challenges.

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"It's just like two friends when you stop talking for a long time, you're flying blind, basically, and you could misinterpret each other's intentions," Zhao said.

From Zhao's perspective, the bilateral relationship continues to deteriorate during the late Trump administration. From kicking journalists out of each other's country to the damaging trade war and frictions over the pandemic. Zhao said former U.S. President Donald Trump's policy towards China was "unsustainable." He's now interested in how much of a difference Biden's approach can make.

"I think President Biden and his administration has made it quite clear that they wanted to maintain a competitive relationship with China, even though that competition could be so-called 'stiff'," Zhao said, "However, they don't see that this bilateral relationship, at this moment, adversarial, and they have insisted that they don't want to go into a new cold war."

In terms of his expectations over the meeting, Zhao said he hopes to see some "pragmatic breakthroughs."

"If two sides decided to cooperate and to alleviate some of the pressure on each other, and allowing, for instance, journalists to return to their original positions and also reducing the barrier of visa, giving convenience to students to travel, and also open the door for local and normal business, transactions and contacts between each other, having more people-to-people exchanges after the pandemic, that will be great."

He adds even though those are small things, they lead towards bigger and better improvement of the relationship.

Before any details of the talks go public, experts believe getting the relationship back on track will be tough. But it's hoped Beijing and Washington can move forward and develop a clearer picture of what they both expect from future negotiations.