China-US military dialogue resumes with a small upgrade
The 13th Beijing Xiangshan Forum, China’s flagship annual defence gathering, opened on 15 September at the Beijing International Convention Center, drawing official representatives from around 100 countries, regions and international organisations for three days of talks. Reuters reported that hundreds of military officers, diplomats and scholars would attend “amid roiling regional tensions.”
The US delegation has drawn particular attention. It is led by Cynthia Carras, the Pentagon’s principal director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, according to the South China Morning Post — a higher level of representation than last year, when Washington sent a defence attaché from its Beijing embassy. Chinese commentators have read the upgrade as a sign that military ties are stabilising.
A cautious resumption of contacts
Carras’s attendance follows a series of renewed military exchanges. On 28–29 May, Chinese and US representatives held a working group meeting of the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement in Hawaii, reviewing rules intended to prevent dangerous encounters at sea and in the air. At the start of September, General Yang Zhibin, commander of the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command, met Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of US Indo-Pacific Command, on the sidelines of a chiefs-of-defence conference in Canada — the first in-person meeting between the two.
The Yang–Paparo encounter was notable because the Eastern Theater Command oversees operations around Taiwan; previous senior exchanges had run through the PLA’s Southern Theater Command. The US account of the meeting emphasised keeping open lines of communication to reduce the risk of miscalculation. Both governments have described the broader resumption as flowing from consensus reached between the two heads of state.
How Beijing is framing the thaw
Chinese state media has moved quickly to shape the meaning of the moment. In an editorial published as the forum opened, the Global Times — a newspaper affiliated with the ruling Communist Party — argued that the return to dialogue reflects a shift in the balance of power rather than any Chinese concession. Washington keeps communicating on security, it wrote, because “using military deterrence to force China to make concessions on its core interests is not practically feasible,” and because “China’s growing national strength is itself an important anchor for China-US strategic stability.”
The editorial framed continued US pressure — additional bases, weapons deployments, small multilateral groupings and warnings of a “China threat” — as increasingly ineffective against a country with a complete industrial base, a large market and, in its words, “a firm determination to safeguard its core interests.” It cast Beijing as able to “safeguard peace through rationality and strength” while drawing “clear red lines through necessary countermeasures.”
Those are the arguments of a state-run outlet, not a neutral account, and they double as messaging aimed at both domestic and foreign audiences ahead of the forum, whose official theme this year is “Build Consensus on Stability, Advance Security Governance Together.”
What the framing leaves out
The Chinese account understates the limits of the thaw, some of which the editorial itself concedes. It acknowledges that the US delegation’s level “does not break with established practice,” and that senior American participation “does not mean that Washington’s military strategy toward China has fundamentally changed.”
The US side has not characterised the contacts as a strategic shift in its favour or China’s. Competition remains the organising frame of American policy, with continuing friction over Taiwan, the South China Sea, export controls on advanced technology, and US alliances in the region. The resumed channels are aimed principally at crisis management — avoiding accidental escalation — rather than resolving those disputes.
For now, the two capitals agree on little beyond the value of talking. That both are again willing to do so, at a forum built around the word “stability,” is itself the signal — even as each side tells a different story about what it means.
