The contrast could not have been starker - a top State Department official speaking of a race-tinged civilisational battle with China, and former vice-president Joe Biden, a front runner for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2020, dismissing the China threat as overblown.

Both extreme views at once drew flak in Washington, where - as in certain Asian capitals - there has thus far, notwithstanding fears of damage from the US-China trade war, been fairly bipartisan credit for President Donald Trump's reversal of decades of accommodation to finally push back against an increasingly assertive China.