'New form' needed for Sino-US relations

The trade conflict heating up between China and the United States can be dangerous and could lead the two nations to slip into a "Thucydides Trap", Harvard professor Graham Allison said in an interview with China Daily on Tuesday.

To avoid the trap - the notion that a conflict could develop when a rising power challenges an established one - the two nations should first recognize how dangerous the outcome might be and then find a new form of great-power relations to avoid it, said the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).

A tariff war between the world's two largest economies could do serious damage to both, he said.