Opinion: Chinese chatter reveals resumption of military dialogue is priority of US outreach
Beijing believes that at the centre of the Biden administration’s ongoing China outreach programme is the issue of resumption of military-to-military exchanges between the US and China.
By Antara Ghosal Singh: High-level interactions between the United States and China seem to have resumed of late, promising signs of a thaw between the two sides. In just a month’s time, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry visited China in succession, restoring high-level contacts between the two countries in the fields of diplomacy, economy, and climate change respectively.
Before that, William J Burns, the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, secretly visited China in May, closely followed by Daniel Kritenbrink, the current US Assistant Deputy Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. More recently, the “unofficial" trip to China by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (who played a central role in US-China reproachment during the Cold War) made global headlines. Going forward, a visit by US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has also been put on the agenda.
Washington’s sudden intense engagement of Beijing amidst a serious downturn in bilateral ties has attracted the attention of the global community, and many are keen to understand what’s transpiring between the two largest economies of the world.
How China is discussing US outreach
Beijing believes that at the centre of the Biden administration’s ongoing China outreach programme is the issue of resumption of military-to-military exchanges between the US and China. The high-level military dialogue between the two has been put on hold since August last year, when Nancy Pelosi, the then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited Taiwan, and China retaliated with multiple countermeasures, including the “three cancellations” involving military exchanges (cancellation of China-US theatre commanders’ talks, defence policy coordination talks and military maritime consultative agreement meetings).
Since then, the US has been particularly eager to re-establish contact with China at the military level. In the following months, various high-ranking officials from Biden’s cabinet have made efforts towards resuming exchanges with the Chinese military but with limited success. In a somewhat desperate move, Xie Feng, Chinese ambassador to the United States, was recently invited to meet US Assistant Secretary of Defence for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner at the Pentagon to discuss the issue.
Explaining the reason behind Beijing’s persistent rebuffing of Washington’s overtures, Shi Yinhong, professor at the School of International Relations, Renmin University, noted that since late April 2022 onwards, the number one priority of the US policy toward China has been to ensure absolute prevention and avoidance of military conflicts between the Chinese and US militaries. But China has always resisted such absolute guarantee, as it believes that it will further strengthen US support for Taiwan without major worry of retaliation.
As a result, the Chinese government has little interest in the restoration and strengthening of high-level military communication with the US. Instead, it wants to keep open the option of an armed conflict with the US in the West Pacific, relying more on the decision of its forward troops and betting on Washington’s hesitance.
In this backdrop, the Biden administration’s high-intensity, high-level contact with China is being read in Beijing as “the US panicking”. That the mighty US is “becoming more and more worried, more anxious, and even more fearful of China”. That it is being increasingly nervous of a military conflict with China so close to the general election. The reason behind the US reticence being: 1) its preoccupation with the Ukraine crisis, and 2) Biden’s own reputation of prioritising diplomacy over conflict.
The back-to-back visits of high officials from Washington has thus become a matter of ridicule for the Chinese commentators. It is being argued that the current US officials are “at their wit's end” in communicating with China.
As Blinken, Sullivan, Austin failed in their objective and left Beijing empty-handed, the US government was forced to send centenarian Kissinger to use his influence to negotiate peace with China. Although China, they say, has given Kissinger enough “face” (in the form of holding one-to-one with President Xi Jinping, Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu and others) due to his past contribution to China-US relations, but it will not accept the proposals of the US government (about reestablishing military level contacts), which he tried to lobby. Instead, the Chinese side hopes that Kissinger will be able to summarise China’s stance on various issues of contention and reverse the US government’s thinking on China based on the discussions at their meeting.
Message from Beijing
The message emanating from Beijing is that the Biden administration cannot deal with China from the 'position of strength' and any easing of Sino-US relations must be achieved under the premise of respecting China's core interests. What is China’s asking price for easing tensions with the US? In this round, it wants lifting of all sanctions against Chinese officials, citizens, and companies, cancelling of all Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods, ending the crackdown on Chinese high-tech companies, and relaxing export restrictions on high-end chips to China, among others.
It is important to note what senior scholar Zheng Yongnian, professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), has to say about the way ahead for US-China relations. He believes that the economy and trade, climate, public health, etc, are topics for daily exchange and maintenance of contact, but not really the basis for a really big negotiation between the US and China.
He subscribes to the view that just as during the Cold War the basis for negotiation between the United States and the Soviet Union was nuclear weapons, going ahead, new technologies like AI (which has the potential of being militarised) will play a similar role in the case of the US and China. If both sides can evenly match each other in the field of AI, then he says, that will perhaps be a new basis for a Grand bargaining between the two.
Analysing the Chinese discourse, one can infer that China’s current proposition to the US is as such: rather than preventing, the US must facilitate China’s technological advancement and hope for “Cold Peace” to prevail like in history. Otherwise, it must brace up for greater risk of military crisis in the Western Pacific. Washington’s response under such circumstances will be closely followed by its allies and partners, including India, and have immense impact in their respective China policy.
(Antara Ghosal Singh is Fellow, ORF, New Delhi. She is a graduate from Tsinghua University, China, and has been a Chinese language fellow at the National Central University, Taiwan.)
(Views expressed in this opinion piece are that of the author.)
