Brown focused on the “importance of working together to responsibly manage competition, avoid miscalculations, and maintain open and direct lines of communication,” said Navy Capt. Jereal Dorsey, a spokesman for Brown. The chairman also reiterated the need for China to engage in “substantive dialogue to reduce the likelihood of misunderstandings” between the two nations, and reaffirmed the importance of opening lines between U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and Chinese military commanders, Dorsey said.
The Chinese Defense Ministry confirmed the call in a statement, saying the discussion occurred after President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached an agreement in a summit in California last month to resume military-to-military communication in an effort to promote stability.
But the ministry’s statement hinted at deeper issues, too, noting that Beijing wants no foreign interference in Taiwan, the democratic self-governed island that Xi has promised to reunify with the mainland. Biden has said U.S. forces would defend Taiwan if China invades, infuriating Beijing, which sees the island as a breakaway province.
Top-level military discussions between the two superpowers have become increasingly rare amid rising tensions. In Washington, a broad bipartisan swathe of officials see China as the chief competitor to the United States — and are vocally calling for more coercive economic and military pressure.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has not conversed with his Chinese counterpart since November 2022 and probably will not do so until at least this coming spring, when Xi is expected to name a new defense minister after the October firing of Li Shangfu under the cloud of a corruption probe.
While relations have been frosty for some time, China cut communication in August 2022 after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) made a trip to Taiwan.
The lack of communication with China at the most senior levels of the Defense Department has been considered especially urgent as the two nations navigate disputes that include China flying a surveillance airship across the United States this year; provocative intercepts of American aircraft; and an increasingly tense territorial dispute in the South China Sea with the Philippines, an American ally.
After last month’s summit, the White House said that while Biden emphasized that Washington and Beijing are in competition, the two world leaders had agreed to resume cooperation to combat drug manufacturing and trafficking and continue “high-level military-to-military communication.”
Brown, speaking this month at the Reagan National Defense Forum, said he was “standing by” to hear from China and saw dialogue with “our adversaries” as important “to understand what we are both doing and prevent that miscalculation.”
Army Lt. Col. Martin Meiners, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday that the Defense Department wants to see “open lines of military communication at all levels” with China, including with Adm. John C. Aquilino, the chief of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. In October, the Pentagon dispatched Cynthia Carras, a defense official focused on China, Taiwan and Mongolia, to attend a forum in China to discuss similar issues, Meiners said.
“We’re ready to deliver on what President Biden announced,” Meiners said.
The Pentagon’s annual report on China, released in October, said Chinese defense officials declined, canceled or ignored numerous invitations to communicate with the United States over the last 18 months. But there were exceptions. In April, the report said, Chinese military officials requested U.S. assistance to evacuate Beijing’s diplomats from Khartoum, Sudan. The Pentagon offered evacuation routes in response.
