# Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China/Chapter 6

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KEY TAKEAWAYS
* In 2022, the PLA largely denied, cancelled, and ignored recurring bilateral engagements and DoD requests for communication.
* The PLA's refusal to engage with DoD has largely continued in 2023.
* The PLA's refusal to engage in military-to-military communications with the United States, combined with the PLA's increasingly coercive and risky operational behavior, raises the risk of an operational incident or miscalculation spiraling into crisis or conflict.
* DoD is committed to reopening lines of communication with the PRC to ensure competition does not veer into conflict.
* DoD's objectives in opening lines of communication include ensuring crisis communications channels, reducing strategic and operational risk, and clarifying misperceptions.
DoD contacts and exchanges with the PRC are conducted in accordance with the statutory limitations of the National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2020, as amended.
STRATEGIC CONTEXT FOR U.S.-PRC DEFENSE RELATIONSHIP
Beginning in the early 2000s, the United States approached defense engagement with the PRC as a means of enhancing PLA transparency, advancing mutual reciprocity, and imparting best practices for air and maritime operational safety. These activities sought to encourage the PRC to play a constructive and peaceful role in a free and open international system.
Despite U.S. and international efforts to encourage the PRC's rise to occur within the rules-based international order, PRC malign behavior has subsequently cast doubt on the PRC's willingness to operate in accordance with international laws, rules, and norms. As the PLA modernizes toward its goal of producing a world-class force by 2049, the PRC has increasingly turned to the PLA as an instrument of statecraft to advance its foreign policy objectives—adopting more coercive and aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific region.
As the PRC pushes the PLA to engage in increasingly coercive and risky operational behavior in an effort to achieve the PRC's policy objectives in the East and South China Seas, Beijing has ​retreated from military-to-military communications with the United States. The ability of the two sides to now effectively communicate to preempt or manage a potential incident caused by risky PLA behavior is weak and raises the risk of escalation.
In August 2022, the PRC suspended military contacts and exchanges with the United States, claiming the cut-off was in response to the former House Speaker’s visit to Taiwan. Roughly a year on, the PRC continues to point to long-standing U.S. military activities in the Western Pacific, the United States’ Taiwan policy, and Washington’s refusal to remove sanctions on the PRC’s newly-appointed Minister of National Defense, General Li Shangfu, for creating a “negative atmosphere” for talks. The PRC’s long track record of cancelling military-to-military lines of communication in response to perceived offenses suggests the PRC views military channels of communication as a tool to punish or reward the United States for its perceived behavior, versus being inherently valuable to maintaining peace and stability.
High-Level Contacts and Exchanges. High-level exchanges between the U.S. and PRC—such as between the U.S. Secretary of Defense and the PRC Minister of National Defense—are an important way to exchange views on the bilateral defense relationship and the international security environment. In the past, the PRC was willing to responsibly engage in high-level dialogue to ensure mutual understanding on a range of policy and operational issues. While DoD continues to seek open lines of communication with the PLA at multiple levels in both operator and policy channels, the PRC now views executing military-to-military communications as a tool to either reward or punish U.S. behavior based on U.S. adherence and respect for PRC core interests.
Recurring Exchanges. Recurring exchanges serve as regularized mechanisms for dialogue to advance priorities related to crisis prevention and management and reduce of operational risk.
Confidence Building Measures and Academic Exchanges. Confidence Building Measure engagements focus on employing mechanisms for risk reduction, briefing significant policy documents, reducing misunderstanding or misperceptions, POW/MIA accounting, and communication to promote international rules and norms. Similarly, academic exchanges focus on building mutual understanding.
​U.S.-PRC DEFENSE CONTACTS AND EXCHANGES IN 2023
The PRC’s refusal to engage in military-to-military communication only sharpened in 2023.
Of note, in April 2023, the PLA requested U.S. assistance in evacuation of PRC diplomats from Khartoum, Sudan amidst ongoing fighting. In response, DoD provided evacuation routes from Khartoum to the Port of Sudan to the PRC and multiple other countries that had requested U.S. assistance.