Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was having trouble scheduling a call with China last month. According to media reports, the Biden administration sought direct talks between Austin and his Chinese counterpart to help dampen the tension in the Indo-Pacific region. The Chinese military “has not been responsive,” according to one U.S. defense official.
China denied the radio silence — a report in the Global Times claimed Austin was seeking dialogue with the wrong person, quoting a Ministry of National Defense official who called the Pentagon’s request “unprofessional and unfriendly.” The Global Times, a state-owned paper run by the People’s Daily, is well known as a hawkish mouthpiece for unofficial views of the Chinese Communist Party.
This bilateral impasse in military-military dialogue is more than a simple miscommunication. Both sides have long struggled to maintain ties between the two militaries. Significant differences in civilian-military relations in each country mean that the U.S. and China have entirely different takes on who should be talking to whom. Moving bilateral discussions forward requires that each side understands how civilian and military institutions are organized.
Civilians – not military officers – run the Pentagon
Despite the recent appointments of retired generals Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin to the post, U.S. defense secretaries have traditionally been civilians. The chain of command runs from military commanders to the civilian defense secretary to the commander in chief — the U.S. president.
Biden has picked a retired general for defense secretary. Here’s why it matters.
This structure is firmly entrenched in law, regulation and doctrine, but the U.S. also has a strong tradition of holding the military as an apolitical and non-partisan arm of government policy. Civilian national security experts and military officers alike are steeped in the logic of political scientist Samuel Huntington’s “objective control,” which describes how the U.S. military gets significant autonomy in exchange for submission to civilian oversight.
China’s military comes under direct Communist Party control
China’s Ministry of National Defense might seem to play an equivalent role to the U.S. Department of Defense. But its role is much more limited — this ministry isn’t in China’s chain of command, in fact. Instead, actual control of the military runs through the Central Military Commission, a Communist Party entity. While the state apparatus also has a military commission, it is an exact mirror of the Party version and the real work happens through the Party channels.
The only civilian within the Central Military Commission’s seven leaders is its chairman, Xi Jinping — China’s president. The two vice chairmen and four other members of the commission are career military officers.
In China, the Chinese Communist Party maintains direct control over the military without a large civilian bureaucracy. Chairman Mao Zedong famously asserted that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and “the Party commands the gun” — and little has changed. The Chinese military is inherently political, and the Party demands political loyalty from its military officers. This major difference helps to account for the lack of a civilian bureaucracy with oversight of the Chinese military — instead, the Party uses political loyalty to hold its military accountable.
NATO is about to launch a formal strategic review. Here’s what that means.
These differences explain the current tension
These institutional arrangements are the source of the current confusion. The U.S. side wants Austin to talk to his functional equivalent. Secretary Austin is number two in the U.S. chain of command directly reporting to President Biden, so the logical move would seem a phone call with Xu Qiliang, a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission who reports directly to the commission’s chairman, President Xi.
Meanwhile, the Chinese side claims that Austin’s organizational equivalent is General Wei Fenghe, the defense minister whose responsibilities include managing contacts with foreign militaries and who has previously met with U.S. secretaries of defense. Austin and Wei do share similar titles, but they do not wield equivalent power over military command and bureaucracy. China’s Ministry of National Defense plays a much more limited role than the U.S. Department of Defense.
All of this means that the U.S. and China struggle to figure out who should engage in military-military talks. Historically, this has exacerbated tensions during crises and proven hard to solve despite numerous efforts.
Because institutional designs are “sticky,” this problem is unlikely to change. While the PLA is undergoing significant reforms, analysts don’t expect these changes will fundamentally change the relationship between the Party and the military. The People’s Liberation Army will remain a political entity that does not square neatly with U.S. notions of civil-military relations. Similarly, the U.S. government is not going to overhaul the way it structures its military, despite growing concerns about military politicization.
Don’t miss any of TMC’s smart analysis! Sign up here for our newsletter.
Talking isn’t everything, but at least it’s something
The lack of a reliable mechanism for dialogue between senior Chinese and U.S. defense personnel raises obvious concerns about risk management and crisis escalation in the world’s most important geopolitical relationship. Experts agree on the importance of effective military-military relations between the U.S. and China, despite skepticism over how much good relations in this area can help the broader relationship.
If defense leaders want to mitigate the risks of escalation, one step would be to figure out how to talk in the event of a crisis. That might take a deeper understanding on both sides of the Pacific about how the respective defense organizations don’t exactly match — and perhaps further discussion on an “equivalents list,” including who should talk to whom, on what issues, via which method and with what urgency. Negotiations might include a mutual recognition that the respective defense organizations don’t neatly align, nor will they in the future.
These longstanding issues in U.S.-China military-military relations won’t be solved overnight, of course. A modest — and logical — first step could be to talk about who should be talking.
Professors: Check out TMC’s expanding list of classroom topic guides.
Tom Fox is an assistant professor of international affairs in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and an active-duty Army aviation officer. He holds an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, where his research focused on Chinese civil-military relations and U.S.-China military-military relations. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.