The meeting, held on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, a regional security summit, saw Austin and Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun agree to work toward better crisis communications in the interest of stabilizing military relations to avert crises, according to a readout from the Defense Department. The U.S. and China will “convene a crisis-communications working group by the end of the year,” the department’s statement said.
The two also traded accusations of blame for recent worsening tensions between Beijing and Taipei, with Austin expressing concern over China’s recent launch of large-scale military exercises close to Taiwan’s airspace and maritime territory, soon after the inauguration of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te last week.
Dong accused the United States of sending “seriously wrong signals” to “separatist forces” in Taiwan.
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Although there weren’t major announcements from their conversation, the meeting was “long overdue” because the two should really meet at least once per year, said Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the Chinese military who is now at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Zhou expressed concern that Lai would prove more “provocative” than his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, meaning China would, he said, have to respond more forcefully, including with more military exercises that will “create a new status quo that Washington doesn’t want to see.”
The United States maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan but does not recognize it as an independent state. However, U.S. policy opposes any Chinese action to take Taiwan — which China considers its territory — by force, and allows for the United States to arm Taiwan and defend it, if Washington deems it necessary.
China cut off high-level military-to-military dialogue with the United States in 2022 to protest a visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, at that time the House speaker. Those communications resumed in November when President Biden met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in California.
The United States has been pushing China on the necessity of such regular lines of communication to prevent miscommunication and to prevent an accident or military miscalculation in the region from spiraling into crisis. This is particularly important in the South China Sea, where Beijing is engaged in standoffs related to territorial disputes with American allies like the Philippines, and amid escalating Chinese military activity around Taiwan
Both sides said the meeting amounted to progress toward a stabilized relationship. The United States underscored China’s commitment to resume theater-level telephone conversations within months and convene the working group on crisis communications before the end of the year.
“It’s vitally important,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, who is attending the conference in Singapore with a delegation of U.S. lawmakers. “We went through a period where Secretary Austin tried to call and nobody answered the phone,” Duckworth told reporters in Singapore. “We need to have regular contact between our militaries. And I do think it’s important for us to be on the record with one another with where we stand.”
But there was little sign of breakthroughs on the most contentious issues in the relationship.
Austin expressed concern about Chinese drills around Taiwan days after Lai was sworn in. “[China] should not use Taiwan’s political transition — part of a normal, routine democratic process — as a pretext for coercive measures,” Austin said, according to the readout.
A group of U.S. lawmakers who visited Taiwan this week said the Chinese military exercises around Lai’s inauguration were the largest since those launched as “punishment” for Pelosi’s visit.
The longer-than-anticipated 75-minute meeting between Austin and Dong was “positive, pragmatic and constructive” and had deepened communications to help avoid miscalculation, Wu Qian, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense, said in a briefing after the meeting.
But Dong reprimanded Washington for sending congratulations and a delegation to the inauguration of Lai, and urged the United States to “take concrete actions to correct its mistakes,” Wu said.
The standoff over Taiwan and Chinese claims in the South China Seas is making it difficult for the two to make progress on the few areas of agreement.
Even though the establishment of a crisis hotline was agreed to by Xi and Biden, Chinese skepticism of the initiative means it will take a some time to finalize, said Zhao Minghao, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai.
“China wants crisis prevention while the United States prioritizes crisis management, which sounds to China like all these communication channels are only going to make the United States feel emboldened to create new crises with impunity,” Zhao said.
Dong, a 63-year-old former head of the Chinese navy, was appointed in December, replacing Li Shangfu four months after Li abruptly disappeared from public view.
The reshuffle is part of broader campaign by Xi as he seeks to root out corruption and streamline the command structure to turn the People’s Liberation Army into a “world-class” fighting force able to go toe-to-toe with the United States.
As defense minister, Dong’s role is primarily about military diplomacy. Operations and strategy are set by Xi and senior members of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission. Dong, unlike his predecessor, is not even a member of the commission — a fact that some of the congressional Republicans attending the security conference in Singapore pointed to as potentially limiting the effectiveness of the meeting.
“It is important to recognize, and I know secretary does, that this guy is not the equivalent of Secretary Austin at all. He kind of has no juice,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), who co-led the Senate delegation with Duckworth. “He’s called the defense minister, but in terms of the power structure of that country and that government, and the Communist Party, he’s not really even a player.”
Navigating China’s rise and its increased frustration at the American presence in areas Beijing considers its backyard — including the South China Sea — has become a top priority for countries in Southeast and East Asia, especially among those countries that want to strengthen trade and economic ties with China while relying on the United States for defense.
China’s “economic, diplomatic and security coercion has been uneasily felt” by its neighbors, said the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the London-based think tank that organizes the Shangri-La Dialogue, in its annual assessment of regional security priorities released on Friday.
“Managing the anxiety over China’s coercion while being bullish over its economic prospects is now a constant preoccupation for many policymakers” in the region, the report said.
While Beijing’s aggression has created growing pushback from the Philippines and other claimants in the South China Sea, it has succeeded in deepening its economic and security relationship with countries like Cambodia.
U.S. officials say China has secretly built a new naval base in northern Cambodia, though both countries deny it. “China never says no to us,” said a Cambodian security analyst based in Phnom Penh who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Ninety percent of what we ask for, they give.”
China has invested billions of dollars in Cambodia to upgrade military facilities and build new infrastructure, though it’s not clear, said the analyst, what they want in return. “They want something. But what is it they want? It’s a fair question. We don’t know,” he said.
Lyric Li in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.
