But today, there are over 300,000 Chinese students studying in the United States, 30 times as many as the number of U.S. students in China, statistics showed.

After traveling around China and homestaying with Chinese families, "we found that we had much more in common than we would have realized," Bissett said. Now part of her job is to encourage young leaders to experience both countries regardless of their career path, as she believes all kinds of collaborations could happen between the two largest economies.

"To really understand a place, it's important for you to physically go there, talk to people...and go experience the diversity that those of both countries can showcase," she noted. "It's part of their responsibility once they return to their home countries to teach other people what they have learned and be ambassadors for the relationship."

Prasad also believes that people-to-people exchange is like "infrastructure" in building bilateral ties as "a lot of knowledge transfer happens when people speak to each other."

And that's not enough for effective communication because "if you really want people to come together, you can put them in a room; but to get them to dance together is different," she noted, adding that the most significant part in exchanges is to "think about how other people think and where their values and their systems and their thinking come from."

"Any people-to-people exchanges is great as long as we make sure people are finding ways to get a break from their own mental paradigms and look beyond themselves," she added.

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