Xi refuses US request for military crisis hotline: Blinken.

China Refuses to Resume Direct Military Communication with US

Despite repeated efforts from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, China has refused to resume direct military communication with Washington, as confirmed by the top U.S. diplomat on June 19. Blinken made this statement shortly after his meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

During the meeting, Blinken raised the prospect of setting up a crisis communication line between the U.S. and Chinese militaries multiple times. However, China has not agreed to move forward with this proposal at the moment, according to Blinken’s remarks during a press conference concluding his two-day trip to Beijing.

“I think that’s an issue that we have to keep working on,” Blinken emphasized. “It is very important that we restore those channels. If we agree that we have a responsibility to manage this relationship responsibly, if we agree that it’s in our mutual interests to make sure that the competitive aspects of the relationship don’t veer into conflict, then surely we can agree and see the need for making sure that the channels of communication that we’ve both said are necessary to do that include military-to-military channels.”

Resistance to Open Communication

As bilateral tensions continue to rise, Beijing has consistently resisted the U.S.’s push to open up lines of communication in order to mitigate the risk of potential conflicts. Reuters reported that since 2021, China’s leaders have declined or ignored over a dozen requests to talk with the Pentagon, as well as around 10 working-level engagement invitations from the U.S. side.

One notable incident occurred in February when a U.S. military jet shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon traversing the U.S. continent. Despite this incident, China has remained unresponsive to communication attempts.

Chinese defense minister Li Shangfu also refused an invitation for a formal meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the Shangri-La Dialogue security forum earlier this month.

Efforts to Engage

During his first visit to China as the secretary of state, Blinken held talks with Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang, Beijing’s highest-ranking diplomat Wang Yi, and had a brief meeting with Xi Jinping. This visit marked the most senior Biden administration official to make such a trip.

When questioned about why Washington would continue engaging with China despite the apparent unwillingness to have open military communications from the other side, Blinken argued that such efforts are necessary to bring about change.

“We’re not going to have success on every issue between us on any given day, but in a whole variety of areas—on the terms that we set for this trip, we have made progress and we are moving forward,” Blinken stated without providing specific details. “But again, I want to emphasize none of this gets solved, resolved with one visit, one trip, one conversation.”