A "lurker" suggested posting this Hudson Institute paper 'Information-based
Arms Control and Sino-American Trust' by Dr Christopher Ford, alongside his reflections on dealing with the Chinese.

I have read the later, not the former and it is perplexing as China is currently seen as an accelerating great power, likely to be in competition, if not conflict with others, not just the West.

The next post tells a rather different story.

From the paper's opening:
This paper was prepared for the Fourth Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, a conference sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Military Science and the People’s Liberation Army, to which I am grateful for inviting me to participate. AsiaPacific security issues are obviously of great importance to our two countries, to Pacific Rim relations, and to peace and security more generally. This paper explores some aspects of China’s relationship with the United States and with its neighbors, as well as the role Sino-American strategic transparency may be able to play in managing those relationships.
Link:http://www.hudson.org/files/publicat...ustDec2012.pdf

From the reflections, which starts with and my emphasis:
Our subject there was Asia-Pacific mutual trust, and indeed the discussion provided an interesting opportunity to learn about that subject. Unfortunately, however, this was principally because our discussion – especially on the first day – did more to demonstrate or model distrust than to illuminate how to lessen or overcome it.

In general, the participants in Roundtable Three broke down into two camps. One focused on the challenges of each side understanding and trusting the other side’s strategic intentions, on the role of perceptions in conditioning such conclusions, and of how to communicate and to modulate future behavior in ways conducive to trust. By contrast, the other camp focused upon trying to obtain agreement on specific characterizations of past behavior before any matters relating to the present (or the future) could be addressed. The first camp, in other words, emphasized trying to achieve forward-looking insight, while the other stressed backward-looking blame-allocation and fault-finding. The second group consisted predominantly of PLA participants.
He ends with:
To be sure, perhaps I am reading too much into a few days’ discussions. On the other hand, perhaps these encounters at the 4th Xiangshan Forum really do offer insight into an idiosyncratic Chinese approach to global order, highlighting a sort of politico-moral imperialism that has few obvious precedents outside the historical Sinosphere. Chinese leaders appear to be strongly invested in other countries’ narratives of China – seeing this as critical terrain for international competition (i.e., advantage or vulnerability) – and they seem to claim the right to control everyone else’s interpretations. If this is so, there may be important policy implications for the United States, and for China’s increasingly nervous neighbors, both about what to expect from Beijing in the years ahead, and about additional ways in which we might perhaps be able to develop effective competitive strategies vis-à-vis the PRC.
Link:http://www.newparadigmsforum.com/NPFtestsite/?p=1498