A former US ambassador to China strongly disputed the notion that the United States and China are engaging in a cold war.

"Using the term cold war is totally inappropriate. The spirit of US-China relations, even when we are in sharp disagreement on issues, does not approximate the spirit of the types of the negotiations that I either participated in or was on the sidelines of during the actual Cold War," said the ex-envoy, J. Stapleton Roy, who is also founding director emeritus at the Kissinger Institute on China and the US.

Roy made his remarks on Tuesday at the Wilson Center at a forum titled "US-China 2018 Year in Review: A New Cold War?". He served in Moscow at the height of the Cold War between the US and the then-Soviet Union.

Roy said that the words used to describe the bilateral relationship can affect the countries' behavior.

"We cannot get into a war with China, because neither party would be able to come out of such a war in a way that would justify the cost of being in the war. We're both too powerful," he said.

In the US 2018 National Defense Strategy, the current China-US relationship is considered a strategic rivalry.

"This overemphasis on strategic rivalry and failure to understand many common interests that we share with China and can work together on cooperatively is in many ways undermining our ability to promote our values, which have to be done by setting a good example," Roy said.

Roy said that the concept is based on the US justifying many of its actions in terms of its national values, but actually doing things in its national interest.

"Essentially, I do not see problems in China that are any more difficult than the problems we have had with China in the past," he said.

Robert Daly, director at the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, said that in the past year, "we have a new misunderstanding on the American side. We are speaking increasingly that every aspect of China's rise is and always has been furiously aimed at US interests. This isn't true. China's rise is mainly about the Chinese flourishing."

Roy said China's progress in the past 40 years, especially the modernization of the country, has been "breathtaking".

"More than 100 million Chinese leave the country every year and come back … all of these things did not exist during the 1970s and the early part of the 1980s," he said. "China was changing in a very important way. But we make a mistake when we try to assume that there is a quick jump from here to there."

Yun Sun, co-director of the East Asia Program and China Program director at the Henry L. Stimson Center, said that rumors about Chinese students' visas being put under stricter review have caused concern.

In October, White House aide Stephen Miller proposed ending all student visas for Chinese nationals.

"All these questions (cause) great pressures in China about the concerns coming to the US as a student," Sun said.

Meredith Oyen, associate professor of history, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said "the idea of cutting off all the access of exchanges is cutting off our ways of understanding each other".

Contact the writer at leshuodong@chinadailyusa.com