Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said his visit to China last week included candid conversations with Chinese admirals about how the world's two largest navies can diffuse tension in the South China Sea.
"We had some very frank discussions about what each side's expectations are and how each of us sort of see the world going forward," Richardson said, recalling his July 18 meeting with Chinese Adm. Wu Shengli, commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy.
Richardson voiced American concerns that the Chinese military may continue expanding its territorial claims in the South China Sea by building man-made islands or possibly expand claims on air space with a new self-declared "Air Defense Identification Zone."
"That was clearly identified as an area that would be very concerning to us. Those were both explicitly discussed," Richard told a group of reporters at the Pentagon.
"I made it very clear that our activity in the South China Sea has been, by and large, relatively constant. We've been present in the South China Sea for a long time and the activity levels and the complexity and all that has not really changed," Richardson said.
"They've established a dynamic I think where they are trying to posture many of their actions as a responsive measure to what we're doing. ... So I said 'Hey, this has been fairly constant — so to what exactly are you responding?" Richardson said.
"He made the point that there has been an awful lot more media attention on this than there has been in the past. And I said 'OK, I got that. You know, we have a free press and they're going to go where their interests go," Richardson said.
Richardson noted that the Chinese "state media is also talking about this as much if not more than Western media."
While Richardson was in China, a story surfaced on Reuters quoting a senior Chinese military official saying that U.S. freedom of navigation patrols could end "in disaster." A commentary in the Chinese state newspaper Xinhua also warned that nations not in the region should keep their noses out of the South China Sea.
"So we had a nice discussion about the role of media," Richardson said, referring to his conversation with Wu.
"How media is influencing populations and maybe raising expectations and maybe raising emotions, those sorts of things. We just pointed out that as leaders we have to make sure that we keep all of this in perspective.
"If there is an initial emotional response, OK, fine — but we've got to get past that to a responsible relationship where we can judge each other on our professional behaviors and always try to mitigate tension and mitigate risk," Richard said.
"I made it absolutely clear … that we've got interests in the region and we've got commitments to allies and partners in the regional and, oh by the way, international law permits us to be there and we're going to continue to be there.
"I think they kind of understand that we are going to be there," he said.
Richardson said broader tension between the two countries has intensified the need for the two navies to maintain rules for responding to tactical encounters and continue to develop the "code for unplanned encounters" that has expanded during the past several years.
"I think it's just a matter of continuing to exercise these types of things, so this gets to be less a point of discussion. It will be just sort of what we do. Freedom of navigation [operations] are ... where they feel the rub a little bit most directly. But its completely within international law so we're going to continue to do those as well," he said.
"When you talk to the commander of the John C. Stennis Strike Group, for instance, who was just there and did a lot of these interactions, he will say, hey by and large, they were executing according to the" code for unplanned encounters.
"People come up on the bridge-to-bridge [radio], they have a dialogue about how it's going to go and its professional. This is an example of how these types of interactions are actually beneficial to moving things forward and minimizing the degree of miscalculation that these days can escalate higher than we want to."
"They are getting to be more and more global as a navy and so let's make sure we continue to apply these codes no matter where we encounter one another.
Richardson declined to speculate about the future of U.S. and Chinese relations in the South China Sea, which some experts say have reached an impasse as the Chinese claim expanded territorial rights and the U.S. refuses to acknowledge those claims by conducting contentious "freedom of navigation" operations in the same area.
"It's hard to comment on where it's going to go forward. You know, five years ago I couldn't have predicted that we'd be here now so I hesitate to make a prediction about where it's going forward.
"At sea, I think continued employment of these types of behavioral rules will prevent tactical things from becoming bigger than tactical. So that is where I'd continue to enhance these dialogues.
"I see this as a progressing relationship not one that is at an impasse," he said.
Andrew Tilghman is the executive editor for Military Times. He is a former Military Times Pentagon reporter and served as a Middle East correspondent for the Stars and Stripes. Before covering the military, he worked as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle in Texas, the Albany Times Union in New York and The Associated Press in Milwaukee.
