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US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visits a Buddhist temple in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, during her visit to the country on Saturday. (EPA/Yonhap News)

The US and China traded potshots in the days leading up to a senior American diplomat's visit to Tianjin in China. The upcoming high-level talks between the two countries are likely to be just as rocky as the previous round, which was held in Anchorage, Alaska, back in March, four months ago.

"The deputy secretary is going to be traveling to Tianjin tomorrow for discussions with the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng," a US State Department official said in a teleconference on July 24, while US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was visiting Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

While the US used the vague term "discussions," the Chinese made a distinction between Sherman's "interview" with Wang and her "conference" with Feng. Sherman is the highest-ranking American official to visit China since Biden's inauguration as US president.

"Deputy Secretary Sherman's meetings are a continuation of the discussions we had in Anchorage in March," a senior official from the State Department said during the briefing. The official added that Sherman had used preceding meetings to "advance a free and open Indo-Pacific and uphold and strengthen the rules-based international order."

In Anchorage, Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi, a Chinese Communist Party Politburo member in charge of foreign affairs, sparred with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan in public for more than an hour.

"As Secretary Blinken has said, the US relationship with China will be collaborative where it can be, competitive where it should be, and adversarial where it must be. And we expect all dimensions of the relationship will be on the table for discussion during Wendy's meetings," the State Department official said.

"We should not avoid hard topics just to be polite because that will only allow problems to fester," said another senior official during the same briefing. These remarks suggest that the US will adopt an aggressive stance in its discussions with China.

Wang shared the Chinese point of view in a public venue.

"There's no country that's superior to others, nor should there be. That's something China would never accept," Wang told reporters following the third round of strategic dialogue with Pakistan's foreign minister in Chengdu, in China's Sichuan Province, on Saturday.

"The US always tries to pressure other countries through force. If the US still hasn't learned how to deal with other countries on an equal footing, it's up to China and the international community to teach it a proper lesson."

"The US is in no position to lecture or point fingers at China," Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China's Foreign Ministry, said during the regular briefing on Friday. "We didn't buy that in Anchorage, and we certainly won't buy that in Tianjin."

By Jung In-hwan, Beijing correspondent

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]