Are US sanctions on China’s new defence chief the real barrier to dialogue?

Washington shows no sign of lifting long-standing sanctions on China’s new defence minister, observers say
‘Political sensitivities’ – not sanctions – are likely reason for stalled dialogue, one analyst says

Two Sessions 2023 (Lianghui)

Minnie Chan

Published: 6:00pm, 14 Mar 2023

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Corrected [3:19pm, 27 May, 2023]

[3:19pm, 27 May, 2023]
An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Li had been under US sanctions since 2018 for his alleged role in the transfer of S-200 air defence missile systems to China from Russia.

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The chances for high-level military discussions between the United States and China in the near future appeared unlikely as Washington showed no indication it would remove China’s new defence minister from a sanctions list, analysts said.

Lifting the sanctions on General Li Shangfu is considered a necessary step by Beijing for such talks to resume between the Pentagon and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), but that appeared doubtful, according to Zhou Bo, a senior fellow from the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University.

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“The US has the initiative and responsibility to remove the barrier, because China’s defence minister is one of the PLA’s top military leaders who specifically takes care of the country’s military diplomacy,” said Zhou, a retired senior colonel and former director of the Centre for International Cooperation at the Central Military Commission.

Li was appointed as China’s defence minister and state councillor – China’s equivalent of a cabinet member- at the annual National People’s Congress in Beijing on Sunday. He was targeted by Washington in 2018 for violating US sanctions by allegedly helping to transfer Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 air-defence missile systems to China from Russia.

But Drew Thompson, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said the sanctions themselves were not the main legal barrier precluding engagement between the two militaries.

“Of course the US can lift sanctions … [but] it is more an issue of political sensitivities, rather than a legal barrier to engagement,” he said.

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PLA scrambles fighter jets after detecting foreign warplanes over South China Sea

“The [Chinese] defence minister can engage the US defence secretary if desired, but [China’s ] ministry of national defence has declined proposals to engage at various levels over the past several months, including with [Li’s predecessor] General Wei Fenghe, so sanctions alone do not appear to be the barrier to dialogue.”

Thompson said China did not send an official delegation to advance talks known as the Shangri-La Dialogue Sherpa Meeting in January, despite a thaw in relations with the US following the Bali Group of 20 meeting between President Xi Jinping and his American counterpart Joe Biden last November.

Zhou Chenming, a researcher with Beijing-based Yuan Wang, a military science and technology think tank, said US officials were to blame for the stalled military communications, because they regard the phone hotlines between the defence chiefs only as “guardrails” to “halt possible military conflicts” during security crises.

“The Chinese military leaders felt that their US peers refused to listen to them, including Beijing’s points of view on the Ukraine war, Taiwan and Hong Kong issues,” he said.

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“If the Pentagon tries to mix professional defence talks with political issues, and just orders and instructs Chinese counterparts to compromise, it will drag US-China relations into a more complex confrontation that will be worse than the Cold War era.”

Zhou Bo said diverging views on the guardrails led to the deadlocked communications, even though both Xi and Biden had expressed a desire to develop confidence-building measures to reduce the risks of regional military conflicts.

“If such guardrails are defined by the US as its way to stop the PLA from using force as the last resort for Taiwan reunification, Beijing will definitely reject it,” he said.

“It’s impossible for Beijing to accept the Taiwan issue and other political agendas as part of the ‘guardrails’.”

But amid the deteriorating US-China relations, Zhou Chenming said it was possible that China would send a lower-ranking military delegation to this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue defence summit, which is set to take place from June 2 to June 4 in Singapore.

As China’s previous defence minister, Wei had represented China in face-to-face and virtual security summits, including meetings with his US counterpart Lloyd Austin, since 2018.