CANBERRA - "The world is big enough to accommodate two very large economies and that's why I'm a strong supporter of US growth and I'm a strong supporter of Chinese growth," said former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in a recent exclusive interview with Xinhua.

Rudd, a fluent Chinese speaker and China expert, said he shared Chinese President Xi Jinping's view on China and the United States, saying"we can in fact carve out a common future for Americans and Chinese as we approach this early decades of the 21st century."

"It (American economy) will remain a very strong, significant, creative economy in the future. Its overwhelming advantage over the rest of the world is its simple power of innovation and the power of American innovation across all of the sciences and all the technologies remains world leading," Rudd said.

"Therefore the argument that the United States economy is in a process of inexorable decline, I think, is a false premise. You need to take a long view of economic history. "

Rudd said working at an Asia-Pacific level to build trust between the US and China would lead to a positive outcome for both countries.

He proposed the East Asian Summit be used as a building block for the US-China relationship and to build strategic trust with a conscious new roadmap for the future.

He admitted that there are a lot of distrust in China-US relations right now, "but if you identify the areas where trust can be built and the trust gap narrowed, then frankly there are a lot of those which present themselves."

He identified four areas with potentials that the two nations can build trust and cooperation, namely cyber security, nuclear weapon non-proliferation, minimizing risks of incidents at sea and concluding the World Trade Organization's current Doha round of trade talks.