Washington should show acumen and courage: China Daily editorial

In his meeting with visiting former US national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger in Beijing on Wednesday, China's senior diplomat Wang Yi said that the US needs to demonstrate the diplomatic acumen of Kissinger and the political courage of former president Richard Nixon, and take actions to clearly and openly oppose "Taiwan independence".

The world is increasingly worried by the escalating frictions between China and the United States caused by the Joe Biden administration's reckless insistence on repeatedly provoking Beijing on the Taiwan question. It was therefore pertinent for State Councilor and Defense Minister Li Shangfu to warn again of the severe consequences of the current lack of communication between the two militaries in his meeting with Kissinger on Tuesday.

He told Kissinger, who was instrumental to the establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations in the 1970s, that the Chinese side is committed to dialogue. But meaningful dialogue won't come easy, as both sides see the other as liable for its present lack of mid- and high-level communication between their militaries.

Washington has time and again blamed Beijing for turning down its offers to resume inter-military talks, which Beijing cut off following the visit of Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the US House of Representatives, to Taiwan in August last year.

Last month, a Defense Ministry spokesman attributed Beijing's refusal to talk with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of the June Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore to the "unilateral sanctions on China", to which Li himself remains a subject. Such obstacles need to be removed before any exchange and cooperation can take place between the two countries, the spokesman said. Yet Washington has refused to lift the sanctions.

Li was correct in observing that the "interdependence between the two countries is being neglected, the history of win-win cooperation is being misinterpreted, and the atmosphere of friendly communication is being undermined". Kissinger, now 100 years old, is in Beijing "under his own volition", as the US State Department said, "not acting on behalf of the US government". So the impact of his meetings and talks in Beijing will therefore be limited.

But unobstructed military-to-military communication is the key to a stable, predictable and constructive China-US relationship, which both Beijing and Washington say they are committed to. As observers have warned, the prolonged absence of such exchanges may prove more dangerous than at any time during the Cold War.

In his meeting with Li, Kissinger said that history and practice have repeatedly proved that neither the US nor China can afford to treat the other as an adversary, and he called for strengthened communication between the two militaries so they can do their best to create positive results for the development of bilateral relations.

It is to be hoped that he can make that point convincingly persuasive on his return to the US.