BEIJING, June 26 -- "The mystic chords of memory...will yet swell...when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

In his first inaugural address 154 years ago, Abraham Lincoln appealed to the best qualities in the human spirit to navigate the United States through the storm of civil war that lay ahead.

A century and half later, another impassioned American has invoked the same notion on Sino-U.S. relations to "allow their capacity for wisdom,tolerance and forward thinking to prevail over historic rivalries, mutual suspicion and the all too pervasive zero-sum mentality."

William Mundell is producing a 90-minute documentary on the U.S.-China relationship, Better Angels, due for release later this year.

Mundell has assembled a team including two-time Academy Award winning director, Malcolm Clarke. It is not the first time the 54-year-old entrepreneur has invested in film-making. In 2009, he produced a documentary on gerrymandering, which led to political reform in California.

"If we could reform as vexing an issue as gerrymandering through a movie that costs less than a million (dollars) to make, I thought we could use the same medium to move the needle on U.S.-China relations," Mundell said.

China's extraordinary rise has challenged the U.S. in many ways. Cooperation usually comes along with frictions.

"Our goal is to change public opinion, a building block of the relationship. We have to dig deep into the infrastructure, the plumbing of the relationship," he said.

In 1991, Mundell made his first visit to China to seal a business contract. Over the years, he traveled extensively in China. He is an honorary professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University.

"I was a fly on the wall, listening and watching, and now I feel it's time to speak up," said the son of Nobel laureate Robert Mundell.

Last year Mundell made 11 trips to China, almost once a month. The self-described idealist stayed at his friend's home in a Beijing hutong (alley), where he thought and rethought how to keep his brainchild moving forward.