TOKYO/WASHINGTON -- The U.S. and China will resume staff-level military-to-military dialogue, holding a recurring exchange named Defense Policy Coordination Talks (DPCT) in January, U.S. officials told Nikkei Asia.
The DPCT is typically led by a deputy assistant secretary of defense from the U.S. side and a major general on the Chinese military side. Past DPCT have included representatives from the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and the State Department on the American side, and officials from the People's Liberation Army on the Chinese side.
In August 2022, the Chinese side canceled the DPCT in protest to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, the first such visit by a U.S. speaker in over two decades. This will be the first DPCT since 2021.
The meeting follows a video call earlier this month between Gen. Charles Brown, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the PLA's Gen. Liu Zhenli, chief of staff of the Central Military Commission, China's top decision-making body for defense.
The resumption of military-to military dialogue was agreed to by U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping at their summit on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in San Francisco last month.
The DPCT will be followed by Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) talks, in early 2024, officials said. The MMCA talks are an operational safety dialogue between the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and PLA naval and air forces.
Held regularly since 1998, the MMCA dialogue seeks to "strengthen military maritime safety, improve operational safety in the air and sea, and reduce risk between the two militaries," the Pentagon said in its China Military Power Report in October.
"We have been in communication with the PRC at the working level about a sequence of upcoming engagements," Pentagon spokesperson John Supple told Nikkei Asia in a statement.
"These kinds of engagements take time to schedule and prepare for on both sides so that defense and military leaders from our two countries -- including at the senior-most levels -- can have substantive conversations with their appropriate counterparts," Supple added.
On Friday, China's top legislative body named Adm. Dong Jun, a top navy commander, as the country's defense minister, filling the post left vacant after the removal of Gen. Li Shangfu in October.
Dong's appointment paves the way for the resumption of ministerial dialogues with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
If Austin and Dong officially engage, it would be the first ministerial talks since November 2022. Dong's predecessor Li, who disappeared from public view in August and was officially removed from his position in October, had refused to meet Austin because Washington had kept his name on a U.S. sanctions list.
Lyle Morris, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, said that Dong's appointment will not only stabilize bilateral defense relations but also allow Washington and Beijing to discuss the issue of deteriorating maritime security in depth.
"Dong's naval background will give him more confidence in interacting with foreign defense ministers, especially those of the U.S., Japan, and Australia, who will raise concerns about unsafe naval and maritime interactions at sea between the PLA and foreign navies," Morris said.
Morris also noted that Dong's appointment will "raise the institutional awareness of the Taiwan, East China Sea and South China Sea problem sets within the PLA and Ministry of Defense," as the admiral took a senior position at the Eastern and Southern Command, which oversee the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, respectively.
Just earlier this month, a U.S. senior defense official had told NBC that Washington's expectation is that China will likely announce its new defense minister in March, when the annual gathering of the National People's Congress, China's parliament, takes place.
The fact that Beijing announced the move now could be part of a new, less-confrontational approach in its foreign policy.
Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said there is urgency in China to stabilize the bilateral relationship with the U.S., due to its struggling economy. He said Beijing's consent to resuming military talks should be taken in that context.
"Given China's mounting domestic challenges, there's a noticeable shift towards a more pragmatic approach that seeks to balance economic development with national security," he said.
He added, however, that while China may reduce the visibility of its "wolf warrior" diplomacy in its public discourse, its continued focus on protecting national and political security will likely remain a decisive factor shaping China's overall foreign policy, leading to a more inward-looking and self-isolating Chinese system.
Even so, Chad Sbragia, a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses and a former senior Pentagon official for China, underscored the value of robust defense talks.
"The importance of doing that in person and formally is hard to overstate how important that is to the Chinese side," Sbragia said. "It's not about trying to convince the Chinese that they should change something necessarily, but it is communicating to them about what the resolve and the position is of the United States."
Sbragia, who traveled to Beijing in late October to attend an annual premier security gathering known as Xiangshan Forum, said he witnessed first-hand how China misunderstands U.S. defense policy -- a potential source of unintended military confrontations in the Indo-Pacific.
"I found that many of the self-described America watchers within the military-associated think tanks had extremely distorted views of U.S. policy positions and I attribute a lot of that to just not having any contact due to several years of separation," due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, Sbragia said.
Lyle Goldstein, director of the Asia Engagement program at Defense Priorities, said military engagement needs to go well beyond these two sets of talks. "Genuine peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific would require a robust, across-the-board engagement agenda between the security establishments, encompassing coast guards, intelligence communities, and even space and nuclear strategic forces," he said.
"The obvious question is whether these fragile talks will survive the coming storm over the Taiwan election," on Jan. 13, Goldstein said. He noted that Beijing seeks to separate the two issues of dealing with Taiwan and dealing with the U.S.
"China wishes to convey to the U.S. that they have no desire to confront, much less enter a war, with the U.S., but such calculations will also not impact their decisions about pressuring or coercing or even invading Taiwan," he said.