The ballast keeping the relationship between the world's two largest economies upright lies in their cooperation on global public good, which is being undermined by the Trump administration's "America First" doctrine, a senior researcher with a leading US think tank said.

Without that ballast of cooperation, it is likely that US-China relations will become more volatile and bounce from good to bad and back on the basis of small events, said David Dollar, senior fellow with John L. Thornton China Center of the Brookings Institution.

For years, academics and politicians in both Beijing and Washington have agreed that trade relations are the foundation of bilateral ties, given that China and the United States are each other's largest trading partners.