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KEY TAKEAWAYS
- In 2022, the PLA largely denied, cancelled, and ignored recurring bilateral engagements and DoD requests for communication.
- The PLA's refusal to engage with DoD has largely continued in 2023.
- The PLA's refusal to engage in military-to-military communications with the United States, combined with the PLA's increasingly coercive and risky operational behavior, raises the risk of an operational incident or miscalculation spiraling into crisis or conflict.
- DoD is committed to reopening lines of communication with the PRC to ensure competition does not veer into conflict.
- DoD's objectives in opening lines of communication include ensuring crisis communications channels, reducing strategic and operational risk, and clarifying misperceptions.
DoD contacts and exchanges with the PRC are conducted in accordance with the statutory limitations of the National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2020, as amended.
STRATEGIC CONTEXT FOR U.S.-PRC DEFENSE RELATIONSHIP
Beginning in the early 2000s, the United States approached defense engagement with the PRC as a means of enhancing PLA transparency, advancing mutual reciprocity, and imparting best practices for air and maritime operational safety. These activities sought to encourage the PRC to play a constructive and peaceful role in a free and open international system.
Despite U.S. and international efforts to encourage the PRC's rise to occur within the rules-based international order, PRC malign behavior has subsequently cast doubt on the PRC's willingness to operate in accordance with international laws, rules, and norms. As the PLA modernizes toward its goal of producing a world-class force by 2049, the PRC has increasingly turned to the PLA as an instrument of statecraft to advance its foreign policy objectives—adopting more coercive and aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific region.
As the PRC pushes the PLA to engage in increasingly coercive and risky operational behavior in an effort to achieve the PRC's policy objectives in the East and South China Seas, Beijing has
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OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
