By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Living On The Edge

This past spring, the United States requested a meeting between Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The two would attend the Shangri-La Dialogue—an annual security conference in Singapore in June—where the United States and China’s defense chiefs traditionally speak with each other. Given the growing frequency and intensity of China’s unsafe and provocative behavior in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, this year's gathering was a significant opportunity for these officials to talk directly. For example, China flew a fighter jet before a U.S. reconnaissance plane at the end of May. The two sides needed (and needed) a way to lower tensions and create mechanisms that could diffuse any crisis.

But China turned down the United States' request. The Chinese government pointed out that Washington had sanctioned Li over China’s procurement of Russian weapons systems 2018. Li would not meet with U.S. officials until those restrictions were lifted.

The decision was disappointing, but it was not a surprise. Since August 2022, China has suspended talks with the United States among major military commanders and defense policy coordinators. The freeze was announced after then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, a trip that outraged China’s leadership. But the reason this rift has endured goes deeper. China has refused to have its military communicate with the United States because it believes silence is a form of leverage. It knows that Washington is concerned about the lack of contact, and it likes that the U.S. military feels uneasy. Beijing wants Washington to worry about China’s provocative military acts, to ask for reassurance, and then not receive it. By depriving U.S. officials of security and certainty, Beijing hopes to pressure them to decrease the United States military footprint in the waters and airspace near China.

Despite its propensity for aggression in its neighborhood, China does not want to start a war. But Beijing does not seem worried that its brinkmanship will provoke one now. The risk of a military conflict in China is low, primarily because the United States is preoccupied with Ukraine and unwilling to open another front in the western Pacific. And although it does not want actual conflict, Beijing appears willing to court the possibility of war. Some Chinese policymakers believe a military crisis could help them establish ground rules the United States will follow when operating in China’s periphery.

The fact that Beijing is more willing to take such risks makes it hard for Washington to restart military-to-military conversations. The United States could try to force the Chinese military to talk by becoming more belligerent—for example, carrying out more patrols or conducting more drills in the western Pacific. But such moves would make the region more unstable, and they still might fail to persuade the Chinese military to have meaningful conversations with its U.S. counterpart. Washington could instead give in to some of Beijing’s demands in exchange for better lines of communication, but that would reward China’s dangerous posturing. For now, then, the best the United States can do is to clarify what military behavior both countries believe is unsafe, work to make ties more predictable, and wait for Beijing’s calculus to change ahead of a major summit between the Chinese leader Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden later this year.

 

Silent Treatment

China’s military policies are not borne of ignorance. Like Washington, Beijing knows that military-to-military relations can lower tensions and prevent the outbreak of conflicts. That is why, during the last six months of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, China frequently reached out to the United States in the hope of discussing crisis management. The Chinese feared that Trump would launch a war over Taiwan to secure reelection, so top People’s Liberation Army officials repeatedly spoke with their U.S. counterparts. China was so worried that the PLA chief Li Zuocheng had two phone calls with U.S. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Both times, Milley assured Li that the United States would not suddenly launch an attack.

Although Beijing wants to prevent unwanted crises, it does not always see such risky scenarios as intrinsically wrong. Chinese officials believe they can use specific concerns to advance China’s interests. At a time when China does not consider the United States will start a hot conflict, it sees brinkmanship as an excellent way to extract concessions, including meaningful changes to U.S. military activities in the Chinese periphery.

Beijing has reason to think it might get them. When China insisted that the United States lift sanctions on Li, the defense minister, as a condition for his meeting with Austin, Biden said his administration was mulling it over. The State Department returned his comments, and Beijing quickly rejected the appointment.

Beijing’s goal, however, is not always to accumulate more negotiating power. Sometimes, Chinese officials want to avoid military-to-military relations altogether and leave their U.S. counterparts in the dark. Beijing thinks that such dialogue serves as a guardrail or a safety net that allows the United States to keep conducting military activity in the western Pacific without fear of repercussions. In China’s view, an open line of communication on military matters actively abets Washington’s behavior, allowing the United States greater freedom of action. Preventing dialogue, by contrast, might keep the United States on its toes, depriving U.S. officials of knowledge about what China’s redlines are—making them more cautious.

Ultimately, to manage crises and prevent conflicts, China believes the United States must stop talking and start eliminating what Beijing sees as the source of tension: Washington’s presence in the western Pacific. As Li said at Shangri-La, when asked about China’s provocative behavior, “Why are the foreign warships and warplanes always circling China’s territorial waters and airspace to begin with?”

China's diminishing aversion to risk is alarming for U.S. policymakers—and anyone else concerned with global security. Beijing may see its strategy as low risk and high reward, but if the United States does not back down, the result could be skirmishes and unintended escalation. For instance, China and the United States might experience a more dangerous version of the 2001 EP-3 incident, when two Chinese military planes collided with a U.S. spy plane over the South China Sea. At the time, Beijing and Washington had better relations and resolved the crash peacefully. But if a similar incident happened today, and the two militaries were not on speaking terms, they might stumble into conflict.

Beijing and Washington have a dedicated hotline for crisis communications, and if another EP-3 incident occurred, the United States would likely try to use it. But when U.S. officials attempted to reach Chinese officials via the hotline this past February after finding a Chinese spy balloon in U.S. airspace, Beijing did not pick up. China views answering the hotline the same way it views military-to-military conversations: as a sign of weaknesses and an indication that it is willing to de-escalate, which defeats the entire purpose of brinkmanship.

And Chinese policymakers are getting quite comfortable with sitting on the precipice. Indeed, within China, there is an increasingly popular (if fatalistic) view that a military crisis may be inevitable and perhaps even desirable. With all the competition in the western Pacific, more and more Chinese strategists are convinced that Beijing and Washington need to reach an impasse akin to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—an event that could bring the two powers to the brink of war—before they can sit down and negotiate the terms of their coexistence.

The United States has no good options for prompting a conversation with China’s military. But there are still a few ways that U.S. policymakers can work with their Chinese counterparts to make military relations more predictable, if not more cordial. Instead of criticizing each other, the two sides could focus on specific concerns where they might be able to come to a more constructive understanding. Suppose China and the United States cannot agree on “safe” maneuvers in air and sea military encounters. In that case, they can discuss and agree on what kind of military behavior should be defined as “unsafe.”

And U.S. policymakers should remember that China’s risk tolerance may not remain so elevated forever. Chinese officials could grow warier next year, depending on what happens in the planned Taiwanese elections. Polling suggests that the current Vice President, William Lai, has a solid chance of winning the election. This victory would start the third consecutive term in office of the Democratic Progressive Party, a party that Beijing sees as wanting to formalize Taiwan’s de facto independence. A triumph for Lai could prompt punitive military actions from China, which would inevitably incur a response from the United States. As China seeks to manage the escalation of this conflict and appeal to the United States to rein in Taiwan, it might see the utility of military-to-military talks and a new round of dialogue with U.S. counterparts about crisis management.

In the interim, however, the United States will have to understand that China has a higher tolerance for risk. Some lines of communication remain open. Xie Feng, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, had an unusual meeting with U.S. defense officials at the Pentagon in July. Before Biden meets with Xi in November, China might see the resumption of military-to-military talks as one way to pave the way for a smooth summit. None of this engagement, however, fundamentally changes China’s goal, which is to limit U.S. military activities in the Chinese periphery. Beijing will keep pushing the envelope until the United States backs away from the region.

 

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