U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken's trip to China restored high-level dialogue between Washington and Beijing, but failed to persuade China's leaders to reopen communications that could help avert a potential military crisis.
Why it matters: The failure to establish a military-to-military crisis communications channel prolongs the risk of miscalculation and conflict in the region, experts say.
State of play: The U.S. military regularly engages in lawful "freedom of navigation" operations through international waters, including the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, over which China claims sovereignty.
- Though China's claims have no basis in international law, the Chinese government uses its military to pressure and sometimes harass other militaries operating in the region, occasionally leading to tense confrontations.
The latest: Recent close calls between U.S. and Chinese military vessels in the region show it is "absolutely vital that we have these kinds of communications military to military," Blinken said at a press conference on Monday in Beijing.
- Restoring military contact remains a "work in progress," Blinken later said in an interview with CBS.
- China's military has previously said U.S. military activity in the region is "deliberately provoking risk."
Between the lines: Beijing "is trying to get the U.S. to fundamentally change its military posture in the region, so it doesn’t want to play into the U.S. attempts to set up safeguards for U.S. military activities in the region," Paul Haenle, director of Carnegie China and former China director on the U.S. national security council under Bush and Obama, told Axios.
- Beijing is using the issue as a form of leverage but may face "harsh judgment" from the international community for refusing to establish a crisis hotline, Haenle said.
- "It’s hard to defend a policy of not talking when tensions in the region between the U.S. and China are so high."
Background: The Chinese government cut off several lines of communication, including military-to-military, after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan last summer, and the bilateral relationship has failed to recover since then.
- Careful diplomacy throughout the fall resulted in a series of high-level meetings, including one between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia in November.
- Blinken was expected to visit Beijing earlier this year but he canceled the trip in the aftermath of the Chinese spy balloon incident in February.
- Since then, Chinese officials rebuffed repeated U.S. attempts to hold high-level talks.
The big picture: Blinken's trip helped put a floor on the U.S.-China relationship.
- Blinken and Xi met for a half hour on Monday afternoon in what Blinken described as a "robust conversation" and Xi hailed as "progress."
- Both sides agreed to support future high-level visits and Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang accepted Blinken's invitation to come to Washington.
- They also agreed to cooperate on several relatively small measures, including creating a working group to discuss the illicit flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals from China to the U.S. through Mexico and supporting more people-to-people exchanges, including programs for students and scholars.
"Both sides clearly used the visit to help stabilize the relationship, which has been lurching toward dangerously intense confrontation," Danny Russell, who previously served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Obama, told Axios.
- The deliverables were "modest" but "Blinken’s visit was intended by both sides to lower the temperature, not to resolve fundamental disagreements," Russell said.
What to watch: Both Blinken and Xi reiterated the importance of responsibly managing great power competition, just as Xi and Biden emphasized in their meeting at the G20 in Bali last year.
- But it "remains to be seen if this iteration of the spirit of the Bali meeting last year is any more resilient to unforeseen balloon-style events than the last one," James Crabtree, executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies-Asia, told Axios.
