Longtime China hand Jeffrey Bader says he's witnessed the ups and downs of complicated international relations

Jeffrey Bader, a top China hand in the United States, heaved a sigh of relief after Chinese President Xi Jinping's first state visit to the United States last week.

Bader had become deeply concerned over the public discourse in the US about China, with some arguing for a more confrontational approach toward a rising China.

"I think the more that kind of attitude becomes widespread, the harder it's going to be to maintain a positive relationship between the US and China," he told China Daily before Xi's visit.

Bader believes that attitude is based on a misunderstanding of China. In a June article: Changing China Policy: Are We in Search of Enemies?, Bader argued that the US should not discard the approach taken by eight presidents since Nixon in favor of an assumption of inevitable hostility and a strategy of across-the-board rivalry that may be compelling in international relations theory but which no president has found persuasive.

"I hope and expect that the ninth president sine Nixon, though faced with an evolving China, will not discard the playbook used by the American statesmen who built and nurtured the US-China relationship and built a generation of peace in Asia," said Bader, who from 2009 to 2011 was a special assistant to the president of the United States for national security affairs at the National Security Council and is now a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center of the Brookings Institution.

On Sept 17, just five days before Xi landed in Seattle, Bader, who has been working on US-China relations since the mid 1970s, wrote another piece titled Chinese State Visits Are Always Hard: A Historical Perspective, reminding people to have a realistic expectation of the relationship and state visit.

Bader said on Tuesday that he was just trying to calm people down.