The US military called China through a crisis hotline during the spy balloon crisis, but Chinese officials refused to speak

But Austin’s efforts failed on Saturday when Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe refused to take the lead, the Pentagon says.

China’s defense ministry said it turned down the call from Austin after the balloon was shot down because the US “didn’t create the right atmosphere” for dialogue and exchange. The US action “seriously violated international norms and set a harmful precedent,” a ministry spokesman was quoted as saying in a statement released late Thursday.

It’s an experience that has frustrated US commanders for decades when it comes to reaching their Chinese counterparts by phone or video as a flare-up crisis heightens tensions between the two nations.

From the American perspective, the lack of reliable crisis communications that helped the US and Soviet Union survive the Cold War without an armed nuclear strike increases the dangers of US-China relations now, at a time when China is showing military might has been growing and tensions with the US are increasing.

Without this ability for generals in opposing capitals to quickly work things out, Americans fear that misunderstandings, false reports, or accidental clashes could allow a small confrontation to lead to major hostilities.

And it’s not about a technical deficiency in the communications equipment, said Bonnie Glaser, executive director of Indo-Pacific studies at the German Marshall Fund think tank. The problem is a fundamental difference in how China and the US view the value and purpose of military-to-military hotlines.

U.S. military leaders’ reliance on Washington-to-Beijing hotlines as a way to defuse flare-ups with China’s military comes up against an entirely different view — a Chinese political system based on slow consultative consultations among political leaders, leaving no room for individually managed, real-time conversations between rival generals.

And the Chinese leadership is suspicious of the whole US concept of a hotline – they see it as an American channel to try to talk their way out of the effects of a US provocation.

“This is really dangerous,” Deputy Defense Secretary Ely Ratner said Thursday of the difficulty of military crisis communications with China, as Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley pressed him about China’s recent rejection of the Beijing-Washington hotline.

US generals are persisting in their efforts to open more lines of communication with Chinese counterparts, the defense official said, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “And unfortunately, to date, the PLA has not responded to that call,” Ratner said, referring to China’s People’s Liberation Army.

Ratner accused China of simply using key communications channels as blunt messaging tools, shutting them down and reopening them to emphasize China’s displeasure or delight in the US

China’s opposition to military hotlines amid rising tensions makes more urgent the efforts of President Joe Biden and his top civilian diplomats and security assistants to establish their own channels of communication with President Xi Jinping and other senior Chinese political officials for situations where military hotlines could go unanswered , US officials and China experts say.

Both the US and Chinese militaries are bracing themselves for a possible confrontation around US-backed self-governing Taiwan, which China claims as its territory. The next flare-up seems only a matter of time. It could happen at an expected event, like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s promised visit to Taiwan, or at something unexpected, like the 2001 collision between a Chinese fighter jet and a US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea. Without commanders talking to each other in real time, the Americans and Chinese would have one less chance to avert major conflicts.

“I’m concerned that the EP-3 incident will happen again,” said Lyle Morris, country director for China in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2019 to 2021 and now a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “And we’re going to be in very different political environments of hostility and distrust where that could quickly go wrong.”

Biden has emphasized building lines of communication with China to “responsibly manage” their differences. At a meeting between Xi and Biden in November, it was announced that the two administrations would resume a series of dialogues that China halted after a visit by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August.

Last weekend, the US canceled what would have been a relationship-building visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken after the Chinese balloon that the US says was used for espionage flew through. China claims it was a civilian balloon used for meteorological research.

The same week that China’s balloon flew over the US, Austin was in the Philippines to announce an expanded US military presence there, neighboring China, noted Tiehlin Yen, director of the Taiwan Center for Security Studies, a think tank. “America is also very nationalistic these days,” Yen said.

“From a regional security perspective, this dialogue is necessary,” Yen said.

What pass for military and civilian hotlines between China and the US are not the classic red desk phones.

Under a 2008 agreement, the Sino-US military hotline amounts to a multi-step process in which one capital routes a request to the other for a joint phone call or video conference between top officials over encrypted lines. The pact gives the other side 48 hours to respond, although nothing in the pact prevents top officials from speaking immediately.

Sometimes when the US calls, current and former US officials say Chinese officials don’t even answer.

“No one answered. The doorbell just rang,” said Kristen Gunness, Senior Policy Analyst at Rand Corporation. Gunness was speaking about an incident in March 2009, when she was working as an adviser to the Pentagon’s naval chief, when Chinese naval vessels surrounded a US surveillance ship in the South China Sea, urging Americans to leave.US and Chinese military officials finally spoke – but about 24 hours later.

It has taken decades for Washington to push to get Beijing to agree to the current system of military crisis communications, said David Sedney, a former deputy deputy secretary of defense who negotiated it.

“And once we had it set up, it was clear that they were very reluctant to use it for any substantive purpose,” Sedney said.

The test calls from the Americans on the hotline would be accepted, he said. And if Americans called to congratulate on a Chinese holiday, Chinese officials would pick up and say thank you, he said.

Anything more sensitive, Sedney said, the staff who answered the phone “would say, ‘We’re going to look into it. As soon as our management is ready to talk, we will contact you. “Nothing would happen.”