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| Members of a Chinese honor guard march under the portrait of Mao Zedong during a flag lowering ceremony on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Jan. 18. AP-Yonhap |
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Le Yucheng made the comments a day after China published its 2021 gross domestic product (GDP) growth figure of 8.1 percent, beating expectations and moving its economy closer to the size of that of the U.S.
"Exceeding the U.S. in GDP, we are not interested in it, and this is not what we are going after," he told a forum held by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at the Renmin University of China in Beijing.
"To meet the people's desire for a better life, this is what the Communist Party of China aims for."
The World Bank estimated the U.S. economy grew by 5.6 percent last year.
That meant the Chinese economy was likely to have been 80 percent of its size, up from 70 percent a year earlier, according to South China Morning Post calculations.
When asked whether China would become the next superpower, Le said the country was not pursuing global hegemony.
"We should oppose the Cold War mentality of unilateralism, interference in internal affairs, making coterie and group politics," he said.
Bilateral tensions between the U.S. and China have escalated in recent months, despite a virtual summit between President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden that tried to find a way to improve ties.
Experts said the two nations have reached a stalemate in trade talks.
China-US relations face "great difficulties" but the responsibility lay with Washington, Le said.
"The crux of the problem lies in the U.S.' wrong China policy, wrong understanding of China, wrong views of the times and world," he said at the forum.
"China and the U.S. should not play a boxing game, we should play a track and field competition ... that is to say, to win the game and the future by becoming a better self."
A report issued by the Chongyang Institute, Monday, urged the U.S. to turn its China economic policy from decoupling to "recoupling," separate from politics, which would allow a wide range of cooperation from pandemic control to infrastructure construction.
China's annual per capita GDP rose to $12,551 in 2021, approaching the high-income threshold of $12,696 defined by the World Bank in 2020.
Despite China's better-than-expected growth last year, Beijing is on high alert for economic headwinds, including a shrinking population, a property sector slowdown and local government debt.
Many analysts have warned the annual growth rate is likely to slow to 5 percent to 5.5 percent in 2022.
It was previously thought China's economy would become the world's largest by around 2030, but Yao Yang, dean of Peking University's national school of development, said it could happen between 2028 to 2030, citing China's growth momentum.
The economist said China's GDP would likely be twice the size of that of the U.S. by 2049.
