The US trade deficit with China in the first 11 months of last year, however, was $209 billion, a 16 percent drop from a year earlier, which was $248 billion, according to statistics from the US Census Bureau.

US President Barack Obama made an ambitious pledge to double US exports over the next five years in his recent State story of the Union address.

Goldman Sachs estimates that such a scenario might require a 4.5 percent average annual global GDP growth accompanied by a 30 percent US dollar depreciation, Reuters said Friday in a commentary.

The US has been a complainant in 93 out of the 400 or so disputes registered with the World Trade Organization in its 15-year history, the most of any nation, Reuters said Friday. Through the end of 2009, only India had more active antidumping and countervailing-duty measures than the US, it said.

Tensions seem to have mounted between Beijing and Washington due to wrangling over issues including the value of the yuan, US arms sales to Taiwan and a scheduled meeting between President Obama and the Dalai Lama, who is viewed by Beijing as a Tibetan separatist.

The Obama administration drew Beijing's ire last week by threatening a "much tougher" enforcement of existing trade rules.

The US and China were also in dispute over the latter's Internet policy, after Google threatened to pull out of the country, accusing Beijing of backing official cyber attacks on the e-mail accounts of Chinese activists.

Wang Fan, an international affairs expert with the China Foreign Affairs University, said Sino-US relations are one of the most important bilateral relations in the world.

"The relation is so complicated that new conflicts continue to emerge while the existing ones are yet to be solved," Wang said.

However, with their expanding common ground, the two countries wouldn't fall into a "cold war," Wang said.

"Relationship between China and the US will always be somewhere between perfect and the worst. That is to say not as good as in the so-called scenario of the Group of 2, nor as bad as any sort of new cold war," Wang said.