But Drew Thompson, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said the sanctions themselves were not the main legal barrier precluding engagement between the two militaries.
“Of course the US can lift sanctions … [but] it is more an issue of political sensitivities, rather than a legal barrier to engagement,” he said.
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PLA scrambles fighter jets after detecting foreign warplanes over South China Sea
“The [Chinese] defence minister can engage the US defence secretary if desired, but [China’s ] ministry of national defence has declined proposals to engage at various levels over the past several months, including with [Li’s predecessor] General Wei Fenghe, so sanctions alone do not appear to be the barrier to dialogue.”
Thompson said China did not send an official delegation to advance talks known as the Shangri-La Dialogue Sherpa Meeting in January, despite a thaw in relations with the US following the Bali Group of 20 meeting between President Xi Jinping and his American counterpart Joe Biden last November.
Zhou Chenming, a researcher with Beijing-based Yuan Wang, a military science and technology think tank, said US officials were to blame for the stalled military communications, because they regard the phone hotlines between the defence chiefs only as “guardrails” to “halt possible military conflicts” during security crises.
“The Chinese military leaders felt that their US peers refused to listen to them, including Beijing’s points of view on the Ukraine war, Taiwan and Hong Kong issues,” he said.
“If the Pentagon tries to mix professional defence talks with political issues, and just orders and instructs Chinese counterparts to compromise, it will drag US-China relations into a more complex confrontation that will be worse than the Cold War era.”
Zhou Bo said diverging views on the guardrails led to the deadlocked communications, even though both Xi and Biden had expressed a desire to develop confidence-building measures to reduce the risks of regional military conflicts.
“If such guardrails are defined by the US as its way to stop the PLA from using force as the last resort for Taiwan reunification, Beijing will definitely reject it,” he said.
“It’s impossible for Beijing to accept the Taiwan issue and other political agendas as part of the ‘guardrails’.”
But amid the deteriorating US-China relations, Zhou Chenming said it was possible that China would send a lower-ranking military delegation to this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue defence summit, which is set to take place from June 2 to June 4 in Singapore.
As China’s previous defence minister, Wei had represented China in face-to-face and virtual security summits, including meetings with his US counterpart Lloyd Austin, since 2018.
