Unanswered phones, missed signals: fear of accidental US-China crisis grows

Name: US President Joe Biden says US military will defend Taiwan if attacked
Uploaded: 2022-05-29T14:00:15.000Z
Duration: 3 min 9 s
Description: US President Joe Biden says US military will defend Taiwan if attacked

Dialogue between Washington and Beijing has all but disappeared, while more ships, planes and submarines are crowding China’s periphery

‘The stakes are higher because each side assumes the other has the worst intentions,’ says an American foreign policy expert

Reading Time:6 minutes

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Mark Magnierin New York

Published: 10:00pm, 29 May 2022

As US-China relations deteriorated sharply in 2020, Beijing feared the US was preparing an attack on the contested Spratly Islands. Washington had forcefully rejected China’s South China Sea claims, stepped up its air and ocean patrols, and ordered the Chinese consulate in Houston to close. In response, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) raised its readiness status and mobilised large-scale exercises.

A crisis was ultimately averted. But experts, former US officials and recent reports suggest that today the two nations face the greatest risk of misinterpretation or an accidental air or sea collision spiralling out of control since 2001, when Chinese pilot Wang Wei was killed and a US EP-3 spy plane forced down over Hainan Island.

“The escalation risk is significantly higher than it was 2001,” said Amanda Hsiao, an analyst with the International Crisis Group and author of Risky Competition: Strengthening US-China Crisis Management, which was released this month. “We saw then a period of political stalemate and tension, about 11 days before a breakthrough emerged. Were something like that to happen today, it would take much more than 11 days to resolve.”

The stakes are also far greater now given the huge economic, political and military strides China has made and the global reverberations that even routine Chinese actions cause.

03:09

US President Joe Biden says US military will defend Taiwan if attacked

And while the odds of an unintended war remain small, the risk is growing, as communication and crisis management falter, guardrails disappear and more ships, planes and submarines crowd China’s periphery. Adding to the mix, the two nuclear powers increasingly frame their competitive struggle as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism, making it far tougher to compromise.

“The stakes are higher because each side assumes the other has the worst intentions,” said Michael Green, senior vice-president with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

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Unanswered phones, missed signals: fear of accidental US-China crisis grows

Dialogue between Washington and Beijing has all but disappeared, while more ships, planes and submarines are crowding China’s periphery ‘The stakes are higher because each side assumes the other has the worst intentions,’ says an American foreign policy expert

Dialogue between Washington and Beijing has all but disappeared, while more ships, planes and submarines are crowding China’s periphery

‘The stakes are higher because each side assumes the other has the worst intentions,’ says an American foreign policy expert