Renewed calls by Chinese officials for the lifting of sanctions in exchange for open lines of communication with the US military are resonating in a diplomatic chasm, even as tensions between the two superpowers continue to escalate.
The Pentagon on Thursday rejected the demand, arguing there is no good reason for high-level Chinese military officials to avoid talks with their American counterparts.
“From our perspective, there are no obstacles to keeping the lines of communication open,” Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters in response to a question from VOA.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “can communicate with his Chinese counterpart at this time,” Ryder added. “Those sanctions do not need to be lifted for him to communicate with his counterpart.”
Austin and China’s Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu spoke briefly during the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore earlier this month, but Pentagon officials described the exchange as non-substantive.
Chinese officials have repeatedly said they would be open to talks, but only if the sanctions are lifted, a demand they repeated on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg News.
“The US side knows the reason for the difficulties in its inter-military relations with China,” Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, told reporters.
“Such obstacles must be removed before any exchange and cooperation between the two countries can take place,” he added.
Liu did not specify the sanctions China wants lifted, but Chinese officials have previously pointed to the personal sanctions on Li as the sticking point.
China spy balloon
High-level military-to-military communications between the two counties have been suspended since before China sent a high-altitude surveillance balloon across the United States in February.
Pentagon officials said China’s military turned down a request to speak after the balloon was shot down and expressed concern that other US calls for talks have fallen on deaf ears.
Chinese officials deny that the high-altitude balloon, which was eventually shot down off the US Atlantic coast, was a surveillance device, arguing that it was instead a weather balloon.
But the Pentagon insisted on Thursday that the balloon was intended for surveillance, though US countermeasures appear to have thwarted its collection efforts.
“It has been our assessment now that it was not collected while it was in transit through the United States,” Ryder told reporters. “Certainly the efforts we made contributed, for sure.”
However, Ryder declined to comment directly on a Wall Street Journal report that the balloon equipment included US-made technology.
He didn’t rule it out either.
“We are aware of previous cases, for example, things like drones and other capabilities, what do they have, where off-the-shelf American commercial components have been used,” he said.
The report alarmed some US lawmakers, who called for more limits on technology exports to China.
“This incident has not been closed,” Rep. Michael McCaul and Sen. Bill Hagerty, both Republicans, said in a statement. “We look forward to seeing the full tech analysis of the surveillance balloon. Competitive actions, such as export controls, must be advanced to deal with communist China.”
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