China Rebuffs Pentagon Chief For Talks Due To Sanctions On Top General

The US confirmed Monday that Beijing continues resisting all military-to-military communications and contacts with the Pentagon. 

The latest specific is that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart, Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu, offering a bilateral meeting to reestablish open dialogue. But General Li is under Washington sanctions, and Beijing stipulated that as a precondition for a meeting the Biden administration must lift the sanctions. 

The US had proposed that the two military chiefs meet on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue, but the offer was a non-starter over the punitive sanctions issue – sanctions which Li has been under since 2018.

At the recent G7 summit in Hiroshima, Biden when asked had said the anti-China sanctions were “under negotiation” but there’ve been no signs of change happening since.

The Pentagon and US administration have placed sole blame on China for the collapse in dialogue among militaries, which is crucial to maintain in the interest of avoiding inadvertent conflict in regions such as in the South China Sea where both naval powers operate.

US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs Ely Ratner said late last week the Pentagon “believes in the importance of open lines of communication with the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and we have sought to build out those open lines of communication. Unfortunately… we’ve had a lot of difficulty when we have proposed phone calls, meetings, dialogues.”

“The US and Department of Defense have had an outstretched hand on this question of military to military engagement, but we have yet to have consistently willing partners,” Ratner emphasized further.

“The Pentagon’s attempts to reach out to China’s military in recent months have been ignored or rebuffed,” Ratner told an audience at the DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But from the Chinese perspective, it seems only natural that if Austin wants to meet and have official dialogue with its defense chief Li, then personal sanctions on him must be dropped.