Thursday marks 100 days since Joe Biden assumed the U.S. presidency. As media outlets began taking stock of the president's report card, changes in the U.S. foreign diplomacy, especially towards China, once again aroused widespread attention.

"We must prepare together for a long-term strategic competition with China," Biden said at the Munich Security Conference on February 20, first outlining his grand strategy on great power relations, and on Thursday, he described China as "closing in fast."

This tone has marked the first 100 days of the Biden presidency, along with some signs of progress though.

Good signs, together with conflicts 

In the past short 100 days since Biden took office, U.S.-China relations have gone through many ups and downs. 

Twenty-two days after Biden's inauguration, the long-waited talk between the presidents of the two countries landed on the eve of the Chinese New Year, making a good start for bilateral ties under the new U.S. president's administration. 

The two leaders said they believed the phone call sends a positive signal to the world, and agreed to maintain close contact on bilateral ties and issues of common concern. 

However, before another important meeting between the two sides in Alaska, the U.S. side took what China saw as three major unfriendly actions – blacklisting five Chinese companies including Huawei, sanctioning 24 Chinese officials and moving against Chinese telecom firms over so-called national security concerns. 

The bright side is, the Alaska talk, as the first face-to-face meeting between senior Chinese and U.S. officials from the Biden administration, ended in a "candid, constructive and beneficial" result.  

Read more: 
China, U.S. conclude high-level strategic dialogue in 'candid, constructive' manner 

"But, of course, there are still differences between the two sides," said senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi after the Alaska meeting. His conclusion was rightly proved as only four days later, China saw another wave of provocative acts from the U.S. 

Luckily, addressing climate change brings new opportunities for good momentum in bilateral ties with both countries vowing concrete goals and efforts to promote the implementation of the Paris Agreement. 

But even this progress came with a negative sign — the U.S.'s "Strategic Competition Act of 2021," which draws a hardline legislative blueprint framing Beijing as a"political, diplomatic, economic, military and ideological power," and a strategic competitor to the U.S. 

Efforts needed to get back on track

The tortuous development of bilateral relations reflects the two countries' efforts to figure out how to get along with each other, but after 100 days, there remains much to be resolved.

"As long as the U.S. can find an answer to the question (that if the country would accept China's growth), they could find solutions to any other problem concerning China-U.S. relations no matter who becomes the U.S. president," said Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai about bilateral ties several days after Biden's inauguration.

When shaping its China policy, Washington "has not gotten out of the shadow of the previous administration, has not got over its misperception of China, and has not found the right way to engage with China," Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi commented several days before Biden's first joint address to Congress on Thursday.

Since the White House recently defined U.S.-China ties using such words as competition, cooperation and confrontation, Wang said the definition ignores the differences between the major and minor factors and shows "a lack of a clear direction and goal."

The right approach to China-U.S. relations is to step up dialogue, deepen cooperation, narrow differences and avoid confrontation, Wang stressed. "The key is whether the United States can accept the peaceful rise of a major country with a different social system, history and culture, and in a different development stage; whether it can recognize the Chinese people's right to pursue development and a better life."

Though concrete events between the two sides in the future are hard to predict, experts say that China-U.S. ties will become "less unpredictable on a day-to-day basis."

"I think that there will be much more consistency of tone from the Biden administration. And I think that there will be more emphasis on some areas where the two countries can work together," Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator at the Financial Times, said to CGTN, adding that element of confrontation that Trump accentuated will remain.

"But I think that they're gonna try to be more focused and more strategic about it," he said.