Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that while his country has no intention of unseating the U.S. as the world leader, China expects America to “remove all unreasonable restrictions.”

“China-U.S. relations today have once again come to a cross roads,” Wang said at a dinner co-hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and The US-China Business Council.

“While China opens wider to the U.S. and the rest of the world, we expect the U.S. to do the same to China and remove all unreasonable restrictions,” Wang said. “In a word, China’s efforts and achievements of reform and opening up in the past several decades have been widely recognized. They should not be deliberately ignored or denied.”

Wang’s remarks come as the world’s two largest economies are locked in escalating trade tensions centered on U.S. complaints about its trade deficit with China, and lack of equal access to the local market.