In an opinion piece for The Washington Post on Wednesday, new Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang argued that “The planet’s future depends on a stable China-US relationship.”

Citing his 17 months as China’s ambassador to the US, Qin wrote about his fond memories of driving a John Deere tractor in Iowa, visiting a corn farm in Missouri and witnessing huge stacks of China-bound containers at the ports of Boston and Long Beach.

“I leave the US more convinced that the door to China-US relations will remain open and cannot be closed,” he wrote.

The soft tone was in line with President Xi Jinping’s New Year’s message that was broadcast on Dec 31.

Speaking about Taiwan, Xi avoided using the word “reunification” – which he mentioned the year before.

“The people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are members of one and the same family,” he said.

“I sincerely hope that our compatriots on both sides of the strait will work together with a unity of purpose to jointly foster lasting prosperity of the Chinese nation.”

Kurt Campbell, the White House coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, predicted at an appearance at the Aspen Institute last month that in the short, and perhaps the medium term, China will seek to stabilise its relations with the US.

“As they scan the international environment over the last several years, I think it’s undeniable that certain elements of wolf-warrior diplomacy have been unsuccessful. They have lost some of their gleam with respect to their soft power,” Campbell said.

“They’ve taken on and challenged many countries simultaneously, whether it’s Japanese waters around the Senkakus, issues associated with India’s border areas, other exploits that suggest perhaps a more ambitious China. I think they recognize that has, in many respects, backfired.”

Campbell said that domestic issues, such as a slowing economy and Covid-19, are also headaches for Xi.

“All of that suggests to me that the last thing that the Chinese need right now is an openly hostile relationship with the US. They want a degree of predictability and stability. And we seek that as well,” he said.

Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a commentary on Wednesday that, “with Xi travelling to the US in November for the Apec leader’s meeting, a calmer environment would support his interest in being accorded preferential treatment by US president Joe Biden.”

Faced with mounting social, economic and public health-related stresses, “it is reasonable to expect China’s leaders will respond by seeking to calm their external environment to concentrate on challenges at home”, wrote Hass, a former national security council director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia under former president Barack Obama.

“To help counter scrutiny of their domestic governance record, they will want to present an image to their people of being afforded dignity and respect abroad. Nowhere will such symbolism matter more than in the US-China context,” he said.

Masafumi Ishii, a former Japanese ambassador to Indonesia and now a special adjunct professor at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University said China will likely maintain its mild approach even after Apec.

“With so many domestic challenges,” Ishii said, “it doesn’t make sense to confront the US until it can climb out of the current mess.”

This is not to say China is on a perpetual charm offensive, Ishii said.

“After an interval, China will likely challenge the US again,” he said.

“As China’s economy and national power gets closer and closer to that of the US, the temptation to challenge will become greater.”

The Apec summit in November will be held in San Francisco.

Chinese planners will want to ensure that the treatment of Xi does not pale in comparison to past Chinese leaders at US-hosted Apec meetings.

In 1993, the late former president Jiang Zemin met with then president Bill Clinton in Seattle, on the sidelines of the Blake Island Apec.

It was the first top-level US-China exchange since the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown four years earlier and paved the way for bilateral relations to recover.

In 2011, former president Hu Jintao met Obama on the sidelines of the Honolulu Apec.

By then it was already the ninth time that the two had met, after Obama became president in January 2009.

Brookings’ Hass said that such Chinese desires will provide the US a window of opportunity to advance its priorities with China in the year ahead.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s planned trip to China in the first quarter of 2023 will be the first step.

“China’s focus on positive optics for Xi’s visit to the US in November will offer an opportunity to leverage form for substance,” Hass said.