WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu took the idiom, “your handshake is your word” a little too literally Friday during the opening dinner of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
Days after Beijing rejected the Pentagon’s early May invitation for Li to meet with Austin on the sidelines of the Pacific security summit, the two shook hands “but did not have a substantive exchange,” Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement.
The leaders of the adversary armed forces “spoke briefly” during the dinner, but have not had meaningful talks since Beijing halted military-to-military communications with Washington after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August, becoming the highest-ranking US official to do so in decades.
In the months since, relations between the defense departments have suffered so badly that the Beijing ministry even declined to speak with Austin when he attempted to phone in early February, after the US shot down a Chinese spy balloon that was conducting surveillance in American airspace.
The tensions are nothing new. China has declined or failed to respond to more than a dozen Pentagon requests for “key leader engagements, multiple requests for standing dialogues and nearly ten working-level engagements” since 2021, a senior US defense official told The Post last week.
“This is far from the first time that [China] has rejected invitations to communicate from the secretary, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or other department officials,” the official said. “Frankly, it’s just the latest in a litany of excuses [not to engage.]”
But the silent treatment is something the Biden administration wants to change, as evidenced by the many attempts the Pentagon has made to reach out to Beijing.
“The Department [of Defense] believes in maintaining open lines of military-to-military communication with the PRC — and will continue to seek meaningful military-to-military discussions at multiple levels to responsibly manage the relationship,” Ryder said.