The Republican, who has called for building a wall the length of the US-Mexico border, said that under a Clinton presidency, "People are going to pour into our country."

Clashing on trade, Trump said Clinton had misrepresented her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, noting that she had originally called it the "gold standard" of trade agreements.

Clinton shot back that once the deal was finished, it didn't meet her standards. "I'll be against it when I'm president," she said.

An article posted by the Council on Foreign Relations on its website compares the two candidates' policies on China.

It described Clinton as wanting to increase cooperation with China in areas of common interest, reinforce alliances in the Asia-Pacific, ratchet up the US deterrent against Chinese cyberattacks and take a stronger stance against China's human rights.

Trump has been described as wanting to increase US military presence in and around the South China Sea, investigate and punish China for unfair trade practices, designate China a currency manipulator and also ratchet up the US deterrent against Chinese cyberattacks.

"I would say how to deal with China's rise constitutes one of the biggest foreign policy challenges for the next (US) administration, but unfortunately there is not much serious discussion or strategic thinking," said Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.

"My view and observation is that China is divided very much like us," Li, an American citizen, told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on Oct 12.

Having campaigned for Clinton in 2008, Li believes there is a lot of misunderstanding in China about Clinton. He was mainly referring to the fact that many Chinese think that Clinton was pursuing a strategy to contain China as secretary of state.

Ted Carpenter, a senior fellow of defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, said the next president will have to deal with mounting domestic calls for trade protectionism.

"Most of those calls are directed at China, but if the new president succumbs to those emotions, a crucial bilateral economic relationship will be badly damaged," he said.

Views among Chinese about the two candidates have changed over time. In an online poll in May by the Global Times, 83 percent of the 8,339 Chinese surveyed said Trump would win the election.

But in a poll after the Sept 26 first debate conducted by Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblogging website, the tables had turned: 48 percent of the 5,685 respondents thought that Clinton won the debate while 29 percent said Trump won the debate, according to a research report by David Dollar and Wang Wei of Brookings.