US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense David Sedney will head an American delegation for a two-day defense meeting with the People's Liberation Army in Beijing today. Both sides are due to exchange views on bilateral military ties and issues of common concern.
The resumption of the high-level military talks between the two countries is expected to play a constructive role in pushing forward bilateral ties. Military exchanges between Beijing and Washington have been suspended since last October because of a planned $65 billion US arms sale to Taiwan.
Facing the global financial crisis and other severe global challenges requires a commitment to maintaining and developing a stable, healthy and constructive relationship. It will not only be in the interests of both peoples, but will also help to bring peace, stability and prosperity to the Asia-Pacific region and the world as a whole.
Military ties have long acted as a responsive weathervane in Sino-US relations. A long-term stable and cooperative military relationship is usually set up between allies or countries with shared strategic interests in politics, economy, security and ideology. With different political systems and values, military relationships between China and the US are the most precarious since normalization of diplomatic relations in 1979.
The US had held to a hostile approach toward China for a long period since the establishment of the socialist nation, ruling out the possibility for any widened military exchange. The two countries even ran into a direct military confrontation in the Korean Peninsula in the early 1950s. A kind of quasi-military alliance was forged between them during the Cold War to deal with the common military threat from the Soviet Union.
However, with the disappearance of the Soviet military threat in the wake of the end of the Cold War, the US adjusted its strategies, and together with other factors, has brought Sino-US military ties into a long standstill. Pentagon's dispatching of two formations of aircraft carriers to the Taiwan Straits in 1996 brought the two countries to the verge of military conflict. The collision between a US EP-3 spy plane and a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea in 2001 thrust bilateral military ties to an icy edge. Under direct efforts from leaders of both countries, stalled military ties have gradually been restored in recent years, although they still remain fragile.