“And this is the scary thing with regard to the Chinese view towards cutting off communications with the US military – not having hot lines.”
After then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan a year ago, Beijing cut off three main military communication channels with Washington. When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing in June, he proposed restoring those channels, but Xi rejected the offer.
On Monday, Studeman said that Beijing could be requiring the US to improve its attitude and show respect, but also working from the belief that a hotline could lead to potentially hazardous action.
The Chinese, he said, “believe that if you have a hotline, that we’re more prone to risky behaviour”.
Studeman suggested China’s perspective of the US as “just don’t give them a safety net and then maybe there’ll be more conservative with their forces and their behaviour”.
People’s Liberation Army fighter jets conduct joint combat training exercises around Taiwan on August 7, 2022, in drills following Pelosi’s August 2-3 trip to the island. Photo: Xinhua via AP
Whatever the thinking, Studeman said, it “leads to very little official communications now …
“This is a very dangerous trend in terms of our ability as major powers to truly work out our issues,” he added.
During the Monday event, former US intelligence officials drew attention to the Taiwan situation and called for more efforts to shape the perceptions of top leaders of Beijing.
Studeman said that if Xi “tries to go after Taiwan, ultimately what will ensue will lead to the downfall of the chairman and the party secretary.
“And I think he underestimates this.”
“Where we need to invest our time and energy is in prevention … this is the main strategy,” he said.
Also at the event, Ezra Cohen, a former acting under secretary of defence for intelligence and security, said that China had been engaged in “irregular warfare campaigns” in the Pacific for 10 to 15 years and that the US should focus on responses to that shift, Cohen said.
The US defines irregular warfare as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations”.
Cohen agreed that “understanding” and “shaping” China’s decision-making process was a critical objective: “You don’t just do that through intelligence collection. You also do that through probing and doing things to elicit certain responses.
“That would help us understand the decision-making process better, but also for us to shape the decision making process,” he said.
In a paper the institute published last month, Hudson – a conservative, hawkish think tank – argued that the Pentagon needed to confront China as a means to discourage aggression.
Those efforts, the institute said, ought to include “undermin[ing] PRC leaders’ confidence in destructive scenarios” and “us[ing] technology in assessment and force design to support campaigning by understanding and shaping PRC leaders’ scenario preferences and risk perceptions”.
