WASHINGTON — Within hours of an Air Force F-22 downing a giant Chinese balloon that crossed the United States, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, aiming for a quick general-to-general talk that could explain things and ease tensions.
But Austin’s effort last Saturday fell flat when Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe declined to get on the line, the Pentagon says.
China’s Defense Ministry says it refused the call from Austin after the balloon was shot down because the U.S. had “not created the proper atmosphere” for dialogue and exchange. The U.S. action “seriously violated international norms and set a pernicious precedent,” a ministry spokesperson was quoted in a statement issued late Thursday.
It’s an experience that’s frustrated U.S. commanders for decades, when it comes to getting their Chinese counterparts on a phone or video line as a crisis is raising tensions between the two nations.
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From Americans’ perspective, the lack of the kind of reliable crisis communications that helped get the U.S. and Soviet Union through the Cold War without an armed nuclear exchange is raising the dangers of the U.S.-China relationship now, at a time when China’s military strength is growing and tensions with the U.S. are rising.
Without that ability of generals in opposing capitals to clear things up in a hurry, Americans worry that misunderstandings, false reports or accidental collisions could cause a minor confrontation to spiral into greater hostilities.
And it’s not about any technical shortfall with the communication equipment, said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of Indo-Pacific studies at the German Marshall Fund think tank. The issue is a fundamental difference in the way China and the U.S. view the value and purpose of military-to-military hotlines.
U.S. military leaders’ faith in Washington-to-Beijing hotlines as a way to defuse flare-ups with China’s military has been butting up against a sharply different take — a Chinese political system that runs on slow deliberative consultation by political leaders and makes no room for individually directed, real-time talk between rival generals.
And Chinese leaders are suspicious of the whole U.S. notion of a hotline — seeing it as an American channel for trying to talk their way out of repercussions for a U.S. provocation.
“That’s really dangerous,” Assistant Secretary for Defense Ely Ratner said Thursday of the difficulty of military-to-military crisis communications with China, when Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley pressed him about China’s latest rebuff on the hotline setup.
U.S. generals are persisting in their efforts to open more lines of communication with Chinese counterparts, Ratner testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “And unfortunately, to date, the PLA is not answering that call,” he said, referring to China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Ratner accused China of using vital channels of communication simply as a blunter messaging tool, shutting them down or opening them up again to underscore China’s displeasure or pleasure with the U.S.
Without commanders talking in real-time, Americans and Chinese would have one less way of averting greater conflict. That puts more urgency on efforts by President Joe Biden and his top civilian diplomats and security aides to build up their own communication channels with President Xi Jinping and other top Chinese political officials, U.S. officials and China experts say.
Both U.S. and Chinese militaries are building up for a possible confrontation over U.S.-backed self-ruled Taiwan, which China claims as its territory. The next flare-up seems only a matter of time. It could happen with an expected event, such as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s promised visit to Taiwan, or something unexpected, like the 2001 collision between a Chinese fighter and a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea.
Biden has emphasized building lines of communications with China to “responsibly manage” their differences. A November meeting between Xi and Biden yielded an announcement the two governments would resume a range of dialogues that China had shut down after an August Taiwan visit by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Last weekend, the U.S. canceled what would have been a relationship-building visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken after the transit of the Chinese balloon, which the U.S. says was for espionage. China claims it was a civilian balloon used for meteorological research.
What passes for military and civilian hotlines between China and the U.S. aren’t the classic red phones on a desk.
Under a 2008 agreement, the China-U.S. military hotline amounts to a multistep process by which one capital relays a request to the other for a joint call or videoconference between top officials on encrypted lines. The pact gives the other side 48 hours and up to respond, although nothing stops top officials from talking immediately.
Sometimes when the U.S. calls, current and former U.S. officials say, Chinese officials don’t even pick up.
