China and the United States should maintain their own characteristics as they strive to keep their bilateral relationship on the right track, Chinese Vice-Premier Wang Yang said at a dinner reception during the fifth round of the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue, or S&ED, held in Washington on Thursday.

"I visited the US 10 years ago and today I find our relationship has grown much closer since then," Wang said. "We always seek common ground during the S&ED, but I suddenly realized we should also keep our differences," Wang said.

China and the US have different cultural heritages and social systems, he said.

"If the world had only winter but no summer, only women but no men, without these differences, how boring it would be," he added.

Wang quoted the ancient Chinese proverb, "You need a little patience to eat hot tofu", to summarize the outcome of the S&ED.

"Everyone knows beginnings are difficult, but we're off to a good start," he said.

He also said that the US has a long history of being a market economy, while China only has 30 years of practice. If it were a boxing match, the two players would be in different weight categories, he added.

Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi said at the dinner that the fifth S&ED had achieved good results and completed its mission of implementing an agreement by Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama in Sunnylands, California, to start building a new model of a major-country relationship.

He said the dialogue provides a new roadmap for the growing relationship between the two countries, and that win-win cooperation requires "wisdom", "vision" and "action".

Both sides should keep an "open-minded" view toward each other's development and have more face-to-face, high-level exchanges to build "mutual trust" in the future, he said.

"One of the best rewards of this trip for me is seeing many old friends and making new friends tonight," he added.

Joe Borich, president of the Washington State China Relations Council, said that he has long advocated free and open trade and investment relations between the two countries.

"I know that this is a difficult and complicated goal to reach, and to reach it we will first have to solve many of the issues on both sides that still challenge our relationship," Borich said.

As for the S&ED, most of these issues still involve finding a way to establish basic trust between the two countries that have fundamental differences between their systems, he said.