America and China need to talk
Beijing is risking a serious crisis
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This week, the U.S. military released footage of a Chinese jet performing an “unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” in the vicinity of an American surveillance plane over the South China Sea. Specifically, the Chinese jet flew across the path of the American plane at a distance of about 400 feet, causing it to shake from turbulence. The incident - which you can see in the footage below - is just the latest example of risky maneuvers performed by Chinese pilots, including one last year when a Chinese jet came within ten feet of an American plane and forced it to take evasive action to avoid a collision.
This sort of thing is incredibly dangerous, not just for the pilots involved but also for peace between the two nations. If an incident like this ends in a mid-air collision then it could start a process of misunderstanding and escalation which ends in further military clashes.
What’s even worse is that China seems to have embarked on a policy of deliberately creating these types of incidents at the same time that it has decided to stop talking to the United States. Time and again, Chinese officials are refusing to talk to the Americans either on hotlines during a crisis or through regular channels of communication when things are calm. Just this week, Beijing denied a request by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to meet with his Chinese counterpart Li Shangfu even though they’re both attending the same event in Singapore.
Lack of communication can easily lead to misunderstanding in a crisis, yet one of the first things that Beijing seems to do when relations with the United States get worse is to cut off communication entirely. That’s a mistake, because talking is particularly important precisely when times are bad and there is the potential for the relationship to enter a dangerous spiral.
Hainan Island, 2001
In April 2001, a Chinese J-8 jet interceptor collided with an American EP-3 surveillance plane in airspace close to China. The J-8 was immediately destroyed, and the EP-3 entered a 5,000 foot dive and nearly crashed into the South China Sea. Its pilot eventually managed to arrest the plane’s descent and perform an emergency landing on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost province. The sensitive technology on the plane and its 24 crew members fell into China’s possession, and the biggest foreign policy crisis faced by George W. Bush prior to 9/11 had begun.
The circumstances of the Hainan Island Incident are eerily familiar to us today. Beijing resented the constant surveillance that America carried out near China’s coast using platforms like the EP-3 and the Navy RC-135 involved in last week’s incident, so they harassed the American planes. They almost certainly didn’t want the collision to occur, but when it did the two nations were plunged into a crisis.
In the days after the collision, American officials ran into a big problem: even as 24 Americans sat in a Chinese prison, U.S. officials could not get their Chinese counterparts to pick up the phone. It took three days before a Chinese official would talk, and at one point National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had to get the Argentinian government to track down her Chinese counterpart at a barbecue and put him on the phone. It was extraordinary that in an incident involving a military clash between two powerful nations, the Chinese government seemed to think that the best thing to do was to cut off communication, not open it up in order to prevent further misunderstanding and escalation.
After eleven days, the U.S. managed to establish consistent contact with Beijing and find a way to de-escalate the situation. Secretary of State Colin Powell sent a letter saying that the U.S. was sorry for the loss of the life of the Chinese pilot and for entering Chinese airspace to make an emergency landing. The American prisoners and their plane were eventually returned, and no similar incident has occurred since. But what if it did?
Nobody’s picking up the red phone
Since the Hainan Island incident, American officials have had all sorts of reasons to pick up the hotline and call the Chinese. The most recent that we know of was shortly after the U.S. shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon which had drifted across America earlier this year. Again and again, the Chinese don’t answer. The U.S. has tried to persuade the Chinese to establish reliable crisis communications for decades, and in 2008 the two nations reached an agreement on a process for talking when things got bad. But Beijing doesn’t ever seem to want to use the channel for substantive discussion, instead using it for a cruder form of communication - when they’re annoyed at the Americans, they just don’t pick up.
There are various theories for why this is. One is that it’s a deliberate attempt to unnerve the U.S. and signal the seriousness of China’s demands. Letting Washington stew, this theory says, might lead to some kind of change in American policy. Another possibility is that the highly centralized nature of the Chinese regime makes it impossible for individual officials to say anything substantive at short notice on a hotline. They either don’t have the authority or they’re afraid of doing something that meets with disapproval from the rest of the regime, which could lead to their political downfall or worse. During the Hainan Island incident, Rice noted that when the Chinese were ready to talk, they used to call at exactly 4:30AM, suggesting a highly choreographed process of daily decision-making.
Whatever the reason is, the outcome is dangerous. U.S.-Chinese relations were much less tense in 2001 than they are today, and the breathing room existed to get through that incident without further escalation. Today, the same might not be true. If an American plane gets downed in international airspace near China, Washington would have no way of knowing whether it was due to an accident or the beginning of a deliberate campaign. The authoritarian nature of the Chinese regime means that the Chinese military might even be incentivized to lie to the political leadership rather than admit it made a mistake, for instance by claiming the American plane acted aggressively or flew over China’s territorial waters. In this state of uncertainty, the absence of any reassuring communication might lead to further incidents - or worse.
Another reason the two capitals need to keep talking is because talking is the only way to understand what the other side is thinking and look for potential areas in which relations can be improved. Not picking up the crisis hotline is scary, but Beijing also frequently denies requests for routine talks during quieter times. Since 2021, the Chinese have refused to talk to Biden administration officials dozens of times, seemingly as a way of signalling displeasure at U.S. policy.
Ultimately, the fundamental issues which divide the two countries are very difficult to solve. China claims sovereignty over the South China Sea even though under international law, it has no such sovereignty. China claims that the U.S. has no right to carry out constant surveillance missions in international airspace near China, even though it does have this right. These differences makes the potential for clashes either at air or at sea very high, and they will remain that way unless China abandons its claim to sovereignty or America backs down from strictly asserting its rights under international law. More talking can’t bridge this divide, but it can help to keep the tensions which it generates at more manageable levels.
Unfortunately, under China’s current approach, communication is being used not as a way of minimizing uncertainty and tension but of raising them. If this is a deliberate tactic, then it’s dangerous but at least it could be changed in moments of real crisis. If it’s instead a product of the Chinese regime’s culture and structure, it will be much harder to change - and much more dangerous when things start to go wrong.