“We must be alert that some destructive forces are taking advantage of the ongoing trade frictions,” Cui told a crowd of about 500 people, including former US trade representatives Carla Hills and Robert Zoellick.

“Extreme ideas such as decoupling, a new cold war, a clash of civilisations are having their way here,” he said.

“Some people in this country are pointing fingers at the governing party and the national system of China, trying to rebuild the Berlin Wall between China and the US in the economic, technological and ideological fields.”

Last week, US President Donald Trump signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law, after the legislation passed both chambers of Congress with only one lawmaker among more than 500 objecting.

The law will, among other mandates, allow Washington to suspend Hong Kong’s special trading status based on an annual certification by the US State Department about whether the city retains a sufficient degree of autonomy under the “one country, two systems” framework.

On Tuesday, the US House of Representatives voted 407 to one to approve the Uygur Intervention and Global Humanitarian Unified Response Act of 2019, which commands the US administration to identify and sanction officials deemed responsible for their involvement in the mass internment of members of ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang.

Pressure on Beijing to allow international monitors into the internment camps has escalated since news outlets in November published reports based on the so-called China cables – a leak of classified documents that indicate the camps were set up as forced indoctrination centres.

Donald Trump: ‘no deadline’ for trade war deal with China

The new tensions erupted as officials from both nations are negotiating for a partial trade deal to postpone tariff increases. But the prospects for a deal were clouded after the passage of the Hong Kong and Xinjiang bills, with the Chinese foreign ministry suggesting it would affect cooperation between the two countries.

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping accused the US of interfering in the internal affairs of China and Russia when he met Russian security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev on Monday. In an unusual remark on another nation at such a meeting, Xi said China and Russia should cooperate to safeguard their security against the threat of interference.

On Wednesday, Patrushev said Russia and China needed to coordinate on pressing international issues, including problems with the US, when he met Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi.

Susan Thornton, a former acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said the Chinese government already assumed that the US-China trade war may drag on indefinitely and that the stand-off may lead to a “partial decoupling” of the two economies.

“We met with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the central party … and people at the National People’s Congress in [China]. They were all pessimistic in the short to medium term about US-China relations,” she said during an event at the Harvard Club in New York on Tuesday evening. “Almost all of them expect things to get worse.

“It seemed very much that the trade-negotiation moment may have passed. At least that’s the sense I got from the Chinese.”

China threatens visa curbs on US officials over Hong Kong and Xinjiang

Sow Keat Tok, a Chinese foreign affairs specialist at the University of Melbourne, said Beijing’s recent outbursts against Washington were a departure from their usual style.

“In this case one is seeing a newly powerful, yet frustrated, China staring down the old superpower, the US. With the ongoing trade war, and recent Hong Kong and Xinjiang bills currently in deliberation in the US Congress, Beijing is attempting to take the high moral ground by depicting this international environment as a cold war redux and all the making of the US,” he said.

“The series of action-counteraction between the two powers over trade to the South China Sea is making China mindful that its ambitions will be contained – even hamstrung – by the existing superpower and a potentially hostile international environment.”

While reproaching China for “forging a role model for dystopian societies of intrusive technologies and re-education camps”, former US trade representative Zoellick also criticised efforts by US policymakers to reduce Washington’s China policy to disengagement and punishment. He also took the Trump administration to task for trying to undercut the authority of the World Trade Organisation.

“We need to be clear-eyed about the real strategic challenges that China presents and disciplined not to distract with blanket blasts that will likely lead to misjudgments and mistakes,” he said.

“We need to compete with China within international institutions and country by country, because it’s hard to beat something with nothing. We need to compete with China by promoting better ideas and practices and through attractive partnerships instead of by retreating and bullying.”

Zoellick championed China’s accession to the WTO, which happened in 2001 when he was US trade representative under then president George W. Bush.

“Their participation in the WTO will be a boost for us and them,” he said at the time.

Additional reporting by Kinling Lo and Lee Jeong-ho