 Good morning. I'm Chad Spraja. I'm a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analysis, and very appreciative to come to the U.S. Institute for Peace and talk about U.S.-China crisis communication. There's a very large tapestry of ways that we communicate and interact. We usually call contacts and exchanges with the PRC. So the ones you normally would think about are the normal track one formal events from department to department or from the U.S. government to China. Behind that there's also a really important pathway that we don't really kind of think about very often but which is particularly for the Defense Department is all the operational activity that goes on, public messaging, public statements, writings, authoritative commentaries. Those are all things that have to be absorbed because those are forms of communication as well and oftentimes really important ones because they have such specificity to it. There's a hidden side to that as well which is those operational activities or even intelligence-generated activities that both sides conduct that each side picks up on that are often not very public but certainly an important component of how each side perceives the other. That's really the trick is if you're an official at State Department or DOD and you're trying to manage these things it's not just when you talk to your counterpart. It's also these other pathways of understanding and information flows that happen and so right now in the contemporary period where we don't have a lot of these formal contacts and exchange events going on at the track one level it becomes really kind of difficult because you're dependent upon these other pathways, ones that are not as certain and certainly not as official and it makes it much more difficult for each side to kind of maintain a kind of rational understanding of what the other side is after minimalist or maximalist positions and kind of where you want to go from that point. For the United States I think one of the main challenges is just understanding how different China is. It really is a different place. I think most people who end up practicing or conducting, having contacts in exchange with China, spent most of their life having contacts in exchange with other folks who are it's much easier, much more negotiating but with China you're doing a lot more bargaining meaning is that you're two sides kind of trying to figure out or come to an arrangement based on national interests in a way that you're going to have to cut some deals or make some accommodations and that's just not how we really practice most of our activities in the United States and so from the United States point of view is when you interact with the Chinese you have to understand you're kind of in one of those bargaining arrangements almost at every occasion and you're really not collaborating in a lot of cases. On the Chinese side I think their biggest challenge is just their political culture is just ultimately different, their political systems are different and it's very challenging to understand from a US side when you interact with the Chinese of how hard it is for them to kind of get through or get past all the gateways and checks that they have to you know that they use to constrain those interactions and it can be maddening at times for US and allocators. Certainly where we're at right now is there's a lot of talk and concentration about crisis communication we must talk in fact the priority of why we need to talk is crisis communication. I just don't think that that's where the Chinese want to be at they don't like talking about crisis communication I don't think that that's their paradigm how they prefer to think about it these are dialectic logic thinkers they like to talk about resolution of contradictions and solving root problems and causes and when you talk about crisis management or guard rails as some talk about trying to institute is what you end up making the Chinese think is you're trying to put in some kind of safety net safety net that allows the other side to be bolder or take a greater risk or potentially bring about crisis and so it might be better to say let's figure out a way to just talk first and then we'll talk about crisis management crisis avoidance crisis prevention rooted in long-standing or long-term kind of policy changes that each side can bargain over that might be a better pathway it may be just too hard to say let's we need to talk about crisis communication let's just first start with let's talk and just try to figure that piece out