Editor's note: U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is the second top official from the Biden administration, after Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to visit China in quick succession in an effort to recalibrate the tense bilateral ties. Why have China-U.S. relations witnessed a continued downward slide in recent years, particularly since the end of Obama's presidency? How has Washington's China policy changed during this period? Moreover, with the upcoming U.S. presidential elections looming, how might domestic politics impact the intricate dynamics of the China-U.S. bilateral relations? To get a perspective on these key issues, CGTN's Sr. International Editor Abhishek G. Bhaya spoke with seasoned American diplomat Daniel Russel, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and currently Vice President, International Security and Diplomacy at the New York-headquartered Asia Society Policy Institute. Russel played a pivotal role as a special advisor to former U.S. President Barack Obama, contributing to the formulation of Obama's Asia-Pacific and China policies. The views expressed in the video are his own and not necessarily those of CGTN.

Edited excerpts:

CGTN: Having served as a close aide to President Obama and also briefly under President Trump, what notable differences did you observe in their approaches toward China? How has this approach evolved further under the Biden administration?

Russel: Almost every aspect of the policy is night and day when you compare President Obama and President Trump. They are radically different in an uncountable number of aspects.

When it comes to China, I think there are two President Trumps. There was the President Trump of 2017 who tried to befriend President Xi Jinping, who spoke glowingly of the Chinese system, who admired President Xi as a strong man. There's a second President Trump and the second China policy that was born initially of his focus on the trade deficit. And that led him to begin putting on tariff after tariff after tariff against China, something that was not supported by most economists or policy people. And things went then from bad to worse.

The fundamental issues that President Obama and his team wrestled with in U.S.-China relationships, economic technological, cyber, protection of intellectual property, legal issues, human rights issues and so on. Those fundamental issues never went away, and in fact, most of them got worse over time. And toward the end of the Obama administration, there was growing unhappiness and frustration in Washington about the lack of progress and the lack of results.

So, when Biden became president, the situation was worse than it had ever been. The U.S. was still recovering from the four years of the Trump administration. His primary task initially was as he said, to "Build Back Better" to restore America's standing competitiveness, its domestic renewal, and secondly, to try to repair many of the very badly damaged relationships that the United States has prized with very close partners, close neighbors and defense allies. That was a major project and I think the Biden administration found it difficult to engage China right away.

It may be that people in Beijing expected that this was a time machine and that since Biden had been vice president from 2009, we were going back to the golden era of the Obama administration, but the world had changed too much. The U.S. had changed too much and China had changed too much. And so, they got off to a rocky start.

CGTN: With the upcoming presidential elections in the United States next year, do you anticipate an escalation in anti-China rhetoric as political parties vie against each other during the campaign? What are the chances of relations improving under such a vicious atmosphere and what would be the impact of U.S. domestic politics on China-U.S. relations?

Russel: The current is moving against us politically, as we approach a U.S. election and this is a familiar cycle. But when you're swimming against the current, you have to swim harder, you have to swim faster. So, not about optimism, and it's not about making predictions. It's about determination.

We, on both sides, need to be determined to try to make the greatest amount of progress to communicate as effectively as we know how and do it now because the current is going to get stronger as the election approaches.

Without a doubt, U.S. politics make it harder to compromise. China is a hot-button issue in most elections and it's hotter than it's ever been before. But that's all the more reason that both sides and both governments need to work seriously and make up for lost time.

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