WASHINGTON, May 26 (AFP) - US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on Thursday (May 26) for vigorous competition with China to preserve the existing global order but said the United States did not seek a "Cold War".

In a long-awaited speech billed as the most comprehensive statement to date on China by President Joe Biden's administration, Blinken said that Beijing posed "the most serious long-term challenge to the international order" despite months of US focus on Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order - and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it," Blinken said at George Washington University.

"Beijing's vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world's progress over the past 75 years," he said.

"President Biden believes this decade will be decisive ..."

The Biden administration recently launched a loose new trade framework across Asia and has set up a forum with the European Union to set technological standards, efforts aimed at uniting like-minded nations as China dominates new fields such as artificial intelligence.

Blinken acknowledged a growing consensus that other nations cannot change the trajectory of China, saying that under President Xi Jinping it has become "more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad."

"There is growing convergence about the need to approach relations with Beijing with more realism," he said.

But he added: "If it takes concrete action to address the concerns that we and many other countries have voiced, we will respond positively."

With no rhetorical bombast or surprises, Blinken drew an implicit contrast to the approach of the previous administration of Donald Trump which spoke in stark terms of an all-out global conflict with China.