The 20th Shangri-La Dialogue kicked off in Singapore on Friday. The three-day security summit attracts senior defense officials, military officers, diplomats, weapons makers and security analysts from 49 countries, including the defense chiefs of China and the U.S.
According to its schedule, Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu will give a speech focused on "China's new security initiative," and his U.S. counterpart, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, will also deliver a speech titled "the United State's leadership in the Indo-Pacific."
Experts said that the topics of the two speeches and the two countries' contrasting practices in seeking their security goals illustrated two different visions of security by China and the U.S., as the former endeavors to advance regional cooperation and common security, while the latter incites confrontation by making enemies.
Common security vs inciting confrontation
Li's speech is scheduled to be delivered at a plenary session of the summit on Sunday. He will expound on the Global Security Initiative, proposed by China in 2022, as an approach to eliminating the root causes of global and regional conflicts and promoting peace and development around the world.
"China stays committed to common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security as stated by the Global Security Initiative Concept Paper. It will not achieve its own security interests at the expense of other countries' security. Instead, China pursues its own security goals, with the security of the whole world as the greatest common divisor. In other words, China aims to provide security as a public good to the world, and all countries can benefit from it," said Yan Zhanyu, an associate professor at the University of International Business and Economics in China.
A day before Li's speech, his U.S. counterpart Austin will deliver his speech on his country's leadership in the Indo-Pacific.
This is the second time Austin has participated in the summit as the U.S. defense chief. Last year, he gave a speech on future steps in the U.S.'s Indo-Pacific strategy, which he claimed in the speech to be "a free and open" Indo-Pacific as the core of the U.S. national security strategy, emphasizing that the region is a "priority theater" for the U.S. defense and that more than 300,000 U.S. service members in the region were working with U.S.' allies and partners.
"Preserving its own hegemony is the real intention behind the U.S. quest for leadership and the strengthening of alliance. In the U.S. view, hegemony is its greatest core interest and international strategic goal," Ling Shengli, a U.S. expert at China Foreign Affairs University, told CGTN.
In recent years, the U.S. has felt its power weakened, and to safeguard its hegemony, it needs to build stronger alliances to exert more pressure on its competitors, Ling said. In the Asia-Pacific, the U.S. induces the region's "Natolization" to curb China multilaterally, added Ling.
Both Yan and Ling believe that the distinctive topics of the two defense minsters' speeches reflect the two countries' different views on the international order and security. China's speech shows that it is willing to share and cooperate with other countries to jointly maintain national security, while the U.S. one reveals a strong zero-sum game mindset, or even cold war thinking, which is to instigate division and confrontation for the sake of its own hegemony.
U.S. hyping 'China threat,' while China reaches MOU
China-U.S. relations remain a hot topic before the summit, and there have been media speculations on whether the two countries' top defense officials would meet each other.
Reuters wrote ahead of the summit that "tensions between the United States and China are expected to loom over Asia's top security meeting."
On Tuesday, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command accused China of conducting an "unprofessional" intercept of a US spy plane over the South China Sea. The accusation was refuted by the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), who noted that the American plane intruded into PLA's training zone in the South China Sea and PLA professionally dealt with the situation in accordance with law and regulation.
Another attention-grabbing event ahead of the summit is China's "rebuffing" of a possible meeting between Chinese and US defense chiefs, hyped by some U.S. media outlets.
Austin told a press conference in Tokyo that he thought "this is unfortunate" and called for strengthened cooperation by the U.S. and Japan as they were "deeply concerned" by China's "coercive nature."
In response to the U.S.'s allegations, China's National Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that the responsibility for the difficulties facing military-to-military exchanges lies entirely with the U.S.
Most recently, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been lobbying the EU partners at the EU-US Trade and Technology Council to align for a stronger line on China, as the U.S. has been pushing the so-called ''China's economic coercion'' theory.
While the U.S. is busy advocating and tackling "China's threat," China has been following its concept to seek common security.
After arriving in Singapore on Thursday, Li met with his Singaporean counterpart Ng Eng Hen and signed a memorandum of understanding as both sides agreed to establish a hotline for high-level communications between the defense leaders of the two countries in an attempt to bolster ties amid rising regional tensions.
According to Ling, these practices are a remarkable manifestation of the differences in security policies between China and the U.S. The U.S. upholds a competitive, hostile mindset to deal with security relations between countries, so it blames China and barely reflects on itself, while China-Singapore cooperation demonstrates the right approach to enhance communication and strengthen security mechanisms to maintain regional security.
U.S. security mindset forges China-U.S. tensions
As two major countries in the Asia-Pacific region and the world, China and the U.S.'s security strategies and their international security cooperation have a significant impact on regional and global peaceful development.
In terms of China-U.S. tensions, experts said that cold war thinking, unilateralism, bloc confrontation, and hegemony are the root causes, and it is not China but the U.S. to blame, as it believes that only by containing and suppressing China can its own security be safeguarded and that China and the U.S. can never live together in harmony.
"China-U.S. relations are the most important bilateral relations in the world today. The Biden administration is currently pursuing a competitive policy towards China. Therefore, the key to navigate the relationship back on track is whether the U.S. will adjust its policy toward China," said Ling.
He noted that the most critical thing is that the U.S. should change its hostile thinking or hostile strategic perception of China, not to see China as a competitor or even a defier, but to realize that they have common interests.
"On this basis, the U.S. should do something practical, including reducing the suppression of China's high-tech industries, keeping high-level communication and promoting cooperation with China, rather than saying one thing but doing the opposite."
(Cover: Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu meets his Singaporean counterpart Ng Eng Hen in Singapore, June 1, 2023. /CFP)