'Absolutely vital': US urges China to restore military communications

By Riyaz ul Khaliq

ISTANBUL (AA) – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday said Washington had urged China to restore military-to-military communications.

“It is absolutely vital that we have these kinds of communications, military-to-military. That imperative was only underscored by recent incidents that we saw in the air and on the sea,” Blinken told a news conference in Beijing after two days of high-level diplomatic engagement with the Chinese side.

He was referring to recent encounters between Chinese and American air and naval forces in and over the South China Sea.

Beijing last month denied a request by Pentagon for a meeting between the countries’ defense chiefs in Singapore.

Gen. Li Shangfu and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin attended the 20th Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore but the duo did not hold a bilateral meeting as China rejected the request.

Blinken said he “repeatedly” raised the need for crisis communication and military-to-military channels during his two-day trip to Beijing, the first by any US secretary of state since 2018.

But he said Beijing had turned him down: “At this moment, China has not agreed to move forward with that.”

“That is an issue that we have to keep working on.

“It is very important that we restore those channels; if we agree that we have a responsibility to manage this relationship responsibly… surely, we can agree and see the need for making sure that the channels of communication that we both said are necessary to do that include military to military channels,” Blinken explained.

He added: “So this is something that we are going to keep working on.”

“There is no immediate progress but it is a continued priority for us,” he said.

On US relations with China, Blinken said: “The relationship was at a point of instability and both sides recognize the need to work to stabilize it.”

“And specifically, we believe it is important to establish better and open channels of communication to address miscalculation,” he added.

Blinken arrived in Beijing on Sunday and held more than seven hours of official and unofficial discussions with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang.

Early Monday, Blinken met China's foreign affairs chief Wang Yi for nearly three hours before getting an audience with President Xi Jinping.

China, like the US, is a dignified, confident, and self-reliant nation, Xi told Blinken.

"The Chinese, like the Americans, are dignified, confident and self-reliant people. They both have the right to pursue a better life," Xi asserted.

He underlined that Beijing had "made its position clear, and the two sides have agreed to follow through the common understandings President (Joe) Biden and I had reached in Bali. The two sides also made progress and reached agreement on some specific issues."