 Good morning and welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. The US Institute of Peace was created by the US Congress as a national, nonpartisan, public institution working to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict around the world. My name is Jennifer Statz and I'm the director of our East Asia and Pacific programs here at USIP. And I am delighted to welcome you to this morning's event. The topic could not be more important or more timely given recent events. We have a terrific panel here to discuss the current state of US-China crisis communications and what we need to do in the future to prevent crises from becoming violent conflicts that would have devastating implications for the rest of the world. So thank you again for joining us. Without further ado, I'm going to turn things over to my colleague, Dr. Carla Freeman, who will tell you a little bit more about today's discussion and introduce our panelists. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. And also I want to express my appreciation to some of our colleagues who helped bring this event together and make it happen. Kemi Adewalari, sorry, first time I've said that. And Alex Stevenson, thank you very much. And to everyone else who helped as well. Good morning and welcome to everyone here at USIP and to those in the audience who've joined us online this morning. As Jennifer said, I'm Carla Freeman. I'm a senior expert here at the US Institute of Peace. And I'm very pleased to be with you and our three experts today to discuss US-China crisis communication. As Jennifer alluded to, the risks of crisis between the United States and China come up frequently here in Washington as a growing sense of urgency about the need for improved crisis communication is more and more a topic of discussion. Amid the clearly intensifying rivalry between the United States and China, one that is increasingly militarized, the potential for the two countries to mismanage a collision or misinterpret each other's signals is a dangerous risk. The peace between both of the two countries and a source of concern not only bilaterally here in Washington and Beijing, but internationally, particularly in Asia, where the cadence of military and paramilitary interactions between the two countries has been rising. Seeing increasingly frequent close calls such as between a Navy ship and a U.S. destroyer in the Taiwan Strait earlier this month and risky maneuvers between a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. spy plane just a few days earlier. The U.S. has been calling on Beijing to take steps to improve crisis communications, military dialogues to follow codes of conduct or so-called rules of the road for unplanned military encounters and to improve communication channels in general. However, China rejected one recent attempt by the United States when Secretary of Defense Austin pursued a top-level discussion with his Chinese counterpart to include this topic. There is speculation among observers watching all of this that there is a difference in views between the two countries on the urgency of making progress on crisis communication or even the effectiveness or impact of crisis communication mechanisms. Earlier, there were U.S.-China crisis communications mechanisms negotiated, including the 1998 Presidential Hotline, the 1998 Maritime Military Consultative Agreement, or MMCA, for meetings and the 2014 Rules of Behavior to Improve Safe Encounters, the 2008 Defense Telephone Link and even a 2015 Negotiated Space Hotline. But whether they were functional remains a question. Last week I had the opportunity to meet William Urie, who is the author of Beyond the Hotline, who argued in the very first book on crisis communication or crisis control written at a very dangerous time in the Cold War that crisis control mechanisms could be established to diffuse crises around the globe, not to resolve underlying problems, but to buy time to implement more durable approaches to managing tensions, reducing flash points and risks, and including doing arms control. Urie starts his book by telling the Arthurian tale of the silver trumpets when Mordred challenged King Arthur, but at the moment the two called a truce on the battlefield and begin to negotiate an agreement. A snake in the grass bites one of the knights. The knight draws his sword to kill it, and the armies see this as a sign that battle has resumed and resumed fighting. By the end of the day, all but King Arthur and Mordred have been killed, and they too then fight each other, dealing each other mortal blows that kill them and bring an end to the romantic kingdom of Camelot. During the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet Union successfully negotiated many agreements that function to reduce the risk of misinterpretation and create shared interpretations of maritime law and codes of behavior. Is it possible or even likely that the United States and Beijing can find ways forward to reduce the risk that an accident or misunderstanding could inadvertently spark military conflict between them? Let me turn to Dr. Michael Swain to begin our conversation today, and then we'll go on to Dr. Devin Ellis, and last but not least, to Chad Spragia. But first, just to briefly introduce Dr. Swain, Michael is a renowned scholar of Chinese security studies who has had a storied career at Rand, Carnegie Endowment, and now Quincy Institute. He has done a lot of seminal writing on Chinese security including on crisis communications, much drawn from dialogues with Chinese interlocutors. Michael, why don't you kick off our discussion? Thank you, Karla. Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure to be here at USIP again. And this, as Jennifer said and as you said, is a really critical topic and one that I think deserves a lot more attention, a lot more discussion in Washington and within the government and also in China that the whole issue of crisis management. What I'm gonna say today is I'm gonna focus on, there are different aspects of this problem that the three of us are gonna focus on, and my focus is gonna be on perceptions, images, self-images, how the Chinese, how the Americans look at each other, and how they evaluate things like crises, because these are really important questions. It's not just a question of do you have a hotline? Do you have a phone contact? Can you pick up the phone and talk to the other side? When you start talking, what are you gonna say? What is your assumption when you do that? What kind of beliefs do you have about the other side? What do you do and say to reassure the other side or to deter the other side? Those things are not simple, easy questions to answer. They require some real exploration. So I'd like to focus on those. And the first thing I wanna do though is just sort of describe what is a crisis? What are we talking about here? I mean, most general understanding of a crisis is that it's an event, usually a discreet event that occurs that impinges on the interests of the countries involved. In this case, we're talking about nations. It has a political military component to it. That is, it has the possibility of escalating to the point of real serious damage to either or both countries, either militarily or non-militarily. And usually there is a time element involved. Usually it's been precipitated by something and it needs to be diffused in some way. Now you have sort of slow moving crises. You can call the Taiwan situation a kind of a slow moving crisis in some ways. But that's not really what we're talking about here in terms of specific incidents and specific types of interactions, although the Taiwan situation could produce that kind of a crisis. So what is the challenge in crisis management? The challenge is to really, in diffusing a crisis, it's to do two different things. On the one hand, you wanna be able to clearly communicate your interests and defend your interests. And by doing so, you wanna communicate a certain level of resolve. That you're committed to a certain particular interest and you're gonna defend it in this crisis. However, you wanna do that without provoking an overreaction on the part of the other side. You don't wanna be so emphatic, so assertive that the other side feels alarmed and they escalate. On the other hand, you wanna also be able to clearly communicate some level of willingness to reach a middle ground or accommodate the other side in a way that can diffuse the situation. But in doing that, you don't wanna convey weakness. You don't wanna show that you're really can be pushed around in the crisis. So a crisis management has to balance between these two vectors, these two different priorities and how do you do that effectively in a particular crisis is really the challenge. Now, Carla mentioned that we've had a project that we've had going for many years. I've been doing with a colleague up at Harvard University with the Chinese that talks about crisis management, talks about a lot of crisis issues. And in the process of doing that, we've tried to talk about what are some good general guidelines for managing a crisis? And there are a range of different guidelines that you should follow trying to deal with these two different vectors of paratives that I just talked about. And it's sort of like maintaining limited objectives, moving in a very incremental way, leaving a way out, allowing the other side to have an exit ramp, et cetera. All of these things are basic to crisis management. Now, when we look at the US-China relationship, you see different perceptions and images that really tend to go against some of these types of guidelines. On the Chinese side, and I'll speak primarily about the Chinese side, but there's also ones on the US side, and I'll try and be as brief as possible, there is a set of images and self-images that the Chinese hold about the United States and about themselves that are not terribly conducive to prudent crisis management. For one thing, for example, Chinese elites and probably much of the Chinese public have a strong self-image of their country as a very aspiring, of course, but a very non-aggressive power. Increasingly confident, but also very sensitive to domestic and external challenges to China's stability and status. With a strong memory of the nation's supposed historical victimization at the hands of the West and manipulation at the hands of stronger powers. Now, these views have made Beijing very sensitive to Washington's actions towards China, which are often viewed as the behavior of a bullying or, as the Chinese say, hegemonic power that can be used at times to try to intimidate or to humiliate or to test the Chinese leadership. So in other words, these kinds of images can exaggerate the tendency to view Washington's crisis behavior as malign. It can undermine trust and it possibly can bring China to overreact to US actions in various ways. And also, the Chinese also have a tendency to view certain types of crises in terms of moral principles. And the Taiwan issue is very much the case in this case. And the moral principle here is, Taiwan is our sovereign territory. It is part of China taken from us. This has been an unjust act. We need to correct that unjust act through our determined resolute effort to try to reunify Taiwan with the mainland. So it's cast in a kind of moral prism that makes it very difficult to engage in more flexible concession and accommodation. And that is also a challenge for crisis management. It's looking at the Taiwan issue in more zero-sum terms. This can often do what's called create a commitment trap. That the Chinese can commit themselves to a certain position in defending their interests in Taiwan publicly. And then they have a lot of trouble backing away from that if they need to. Because of the high level of importance of the Taiwan issue and because the Chinese government does not want to be seen as weak in responding to a U.S. pressure. So the idea of a commitment trap which will limit flexibility is an important problem that the Chinese face in the Taiwan situation. But it's not unique to the Chinese. The Americans could also face a commitment trap in their desire to try and defend their interests. And let me say a little bit about the U.S. side. I think the United States also has a tendency to view crises not necessarily in moral terms but in ideological terms in zero-sum terms. Increasingly the idea that a crisis involves a confrontation between a democratic state or the defense of a democratic entity, Taiwan, and an authoritarian entity. And that that kind of a prism, that kind of an interpretation of what the basic issue is in a crisis can also limit flexibility can create commitment traps. The United States also conveys a strong desire or has a strong desire to convey resolve in a Taiwan crisis, for example, because it's trying to defend the credibility of its position as it relates to Taiwan. It wants a peaceful resolution of the problem. It's willing to act in a very assertive way to try and deter the Chinese and defend that peaceful resolution. So the expression of resolve is also a very important thing. And then of course in the past we have seen we have a history of conflict and crisis and confrontation with the Chinese going all the way back to the Korean War and all the way through the 1950s where the United States at one point actually threatened the use of nuclear weapons against China in the context of the Taiwan straight crisis at that time and then running all the way up through the Taiwan crisis of 1995, 96 where there was a really strong desire on the part of both sides to convey their interests, defend their interests and show resolve but they were able to back away. Now let me end by just a word of brightness that is to say a more positive element here. It's not all gloom and doom despite the fact that you have these negative images and self-images and assumptions that operate on both sides. I think it is the case and we've seen this in our project with the Chinese that there is a greater recognition within China at least among the interaction, the people we've interacted with many of whom have access to the higher reaches of the Chinese government. There is a recognition that you need to be able to manage a crisis effectively that there are dos and don'ts for crisis management that you should be observing that try to suppress these more negative self-images and that there needs to be more dialogue between the United States and China to reach some common understanding about where the red lines are, what are the possible misperceptions that can emerge and where you need to really restrain yourself, not just the other side in acting to try to manage a crisis. We've seen a good deal of recognition of this in our interactions with the Chinese and as I say, I think it does percolate up into higher reaches in the Chinese leadership although there still is some very significant limitations on how far the Chinese are willing to go in engaging in crisis management dialogue and I'm sure that Chad and Devin will be mentioning that but I think I'll stop here. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Michael. Now let's turn to Devin. First let me introduce him. Dr. Ellis is a senior faculty specialist. It's just Mr. Sorry. Mr. Ellis is a senior faculty specialist at the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland where he leads the congressionally mandated Asymmetric Threats Analysis Center. He has deep experience running war games on US-China military interactions and began his career working on US-China crisis management issues, including participating in nearly 20 years of groundbreaking track two dialogues with the PRC. Devin, I thought I might ask you to address what you see as the key escalation risks today between the US and China and also some of the factors in the Chinese system itself that shape interactions with the US in crisis management but of course I would love to hear about lessons drawn from your work running these war games and also the dialogues that you've engaged in. Sure. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you all today. I have worked on Michael's project for most of its existence as well as on a number of other track two projects, mostly as a simulation and war game designer and then as a analog to that have provided that kind of expertise to the United States National Security Establishment working in China red teams in Defense Department war games and in US State Department games doing similar types of things. And so I want to kind of try and address your questions Karlo by talking about some of the practical, technical problems, as you said that we see. And I guess I would kind of bend them in two ways. The problems that we have learned about in bilateral track two aiming and dialogues with the Chinese and then the problems that we see when we are trying to do planning and preparedness ourselves. So Michael gave a great definition of what we mean when we say a crisis in these contexts. You know, your sort of political military crisis which is where we really see the risk of serious escalation with the US-China relationship. Political science has a neat definition which is that a crisis has a threat to fundamental values, a finite time for resolution and a heightened risk of kinetic activity or violence. And so when you combine those factors it can span things that include a long-term diplomatic situations that flare up like Taiwan but then also tend to draw in a military activity. And that's where we get into trying to simulate the moves and counter moves that might take place where we to actually be in a situation whether it was precipitated by that type of exchange. For example, the 95-96 Straits Crisis which was precipitated by a series of well understood and pre-planned diplomatic exchanges or something like the P3 Crisis which was precipitated by an accident. And which in reference to the recent near miss with a ship in the Taiwan Strait is the kind of thing that we worry about consistently. And some of the lessons that we've learned about the risks that we can run and how to try and manage them in the course of doing this when we talk about playing with the Chinese, part of it is signaling. One of the major features of Chinese military policy is that they haven't seriously engaged in a major war since the last time they invaded Vietnam and they still despite their intense investment in defense equipment and their extensive building in the South China Sea, et cetera, are not experienced operators of a modern military and do not have power projection experience. And so where we see this come into play in misinterpretations that can lead to escalation very easily is, for example, in a scenario where there's an incident near the Philippines and the United States isn't sure what's going to happen. And so you have a sort of automatic set of moves by the US government to position forces, to be able to respond to a situation should it actually turn into a crisis that escalates. Well, how do you do that? We are spread all over the entire Second Island chain through a broad area of the Pacific and we still have a limited amount of forces despite how big the US military is. So you start to move things around and you're doing it for mechanical logistical reasons because it takes a certain amount of days to get people off of shore leave onto a ship and get that ship moving and make sure it's provisioned and get it from A to B based on its speed and weather conditions and other navigational challenges. What we have seen repeatedly is that our Chinese counterparts look at things moving on the board and add, I'm not gonna say moral interpretations but as Michael I think would agree, they add policy signaling interpretations to things that US actors are not even thinking about as policy signaling. We had one particular scenario that we played years ago where a large number of forces were shifted from Japan towards the South China Sea for exactly the sort of staging purpose and the Chinese escalated the crisis significantly in other arenas at the same time and afterwards when we asked them why, they said, well, you were clearly telling us by moving your forces that you were escalating and the senior US military representative in that exchange said no. There was no directive from the White House to escalate. There was a directive to be ready. So my job as the commander is to get ready to be ready. And that's a concept that because of the lack of 80 years of experience in power projection with military forces, it's just not part of the thinking that goes into Chinese crisis management in a lot of ways. That's a really significant thing because it leads to misinterpretations. One of the other major things that we have found repeatedly over a long period of time is the US ally engagement which should be something that could lead to off ramps for crises. Again can be misinterpreted when we hear a narrative from Beijing repeatedly of the US alliance system in the Asia Pacific was specifically designed to encircle China and you are tightening the noose around us. And every time a new base is opened, every time a new, when we went back to the Philippines, there was a mini political crisis when we posted Marines in Australia. There was a mini political crisis and we have to repeatedly keep saying, well, the other side to this narrative here is that first of all, that system really wasn't designed to encircle you, right? However, you are creating a self fulfilling narrative by responding aggressively every time the United States makes a move there. These are the kinds of things where you have these oppositional viewpoints where both sides have quite plausible lenses through which they're viewing what's happening and it can be very difficult if you don't have relationships of trust to diffuse that because we can say we're not moving an aircraft carrier to deter you, we're moving it because we have to move it. But if you don't have any kind of plausible relationship of trust, you can't do that. We've worked this problem somewhat from the very tactical level, right? Like how do you behave when you have an inexperienced military and a very experienced military encountering each other with 1,000 ton ships in close proximity in a tactical way all the way up to the red phone analogies, right? Can you actually get a hold of your counterpart in Beijing if you are in the White House or in the Defense Department or in the State Department when it really needs to be done? Not when it's a routine check of the phone line but when danger is present. And so one of the analogies that we've drawn from the Cold War as an example of a crisis where that type of relationship management and that type of experience operating adjacent to each other was really important is the able archer crisis in the 1980s when the U.S. and the Soviet Union almost engaged in a nuclear exchange because the Soviets thought the United States military exercise was an actual beginning of a nuclear escalation. And there were sort of two critical events in that instance that prevented further escalation. One was a U.S. military commander who had deep experience watching what the Soviet forces did when they were serious about things versus exercises and said, was able to kinda look at what was happening and say, hey, I think they think we're really going for this. You can't have that unless you have experience sort of engaging with the other side and the other was intelligence relationships where U.S. intelligence community and Soviet intelligence community people had enough detente between themselves in their own just need to create professional space between each other that they were able to pick up and call their counterparts and say, is this for real? And so one of the things that we've encouraged as we've tried to develop practical lessons for how to deal with this escalation dynamic are those sorts of tools and mechanisms. And there are long lists of mechanisms that both we and the Chinese have generated that hopefully will continue to be circulated and refined and adopted to prevent dangerous escalation. Then the last note I'll make is flipping it over to the risks of how the United States exercises to train itself with regard to China just due to sort of two big factors. One, the sheer size of the US National Security Establishment and two, the ever increasing prevalence of security concerns that dictate that the people who are most involved in our planning are also least in contact with our potential adversaries. There isn't a deep broad expertise culturally in the kinds of dynamics and issues that Michael was highlighting amongst the people who do the day-to-day planning and exercising around the US-China security relationship in particularly in the defense establishment. And I have personally seen how that can damage our assumptions in very significant ways because you might go to let's say a very large naval exercise where you have hundreds of senior through junior officers who are all playing their parts going through a scenario of a crisis like this. And the team playing Beijing is two US majors neither of whom speak the language neither of whom have ever been to the country and who are probably banned by their security officers from ever speaking to a Chinese person. But they know because they've read English translations of Chinese doctrine that that is supposedly this is how the Chinese will behave. We know that and they're inferring intent. And just from 20 years of actually trying to understand each other, we're still not doing it. And so that's a kind of a scary thing. It's not how you would plan the safety on an aircraft, for example, is by inferring the intent and guessing. And I'll just hammer that point home by mentioning an anecdote many years ago. A couple of us were speaking with a senior Chinese official who was involved heavily in their national security and national military education system and sort of drilling this person about, okay, well, you made these changes to these words in this particular document. Why did you do that? What does this mean? Why did it change from the last version? And the answer that we got back was, you know what guys, sometimes we get tired and we just pick a word. Reading too much into this, right? You really, you know, and so again, to come back to this sort of Kremlinology example, I think we have to be super careful in crisis management to always take a step back and think about, how well we really are understanding the motivations and the interpretations of the other side of a crisis. And that's why the communication and the caution are so important. Then I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much. That's a great segue to Chad Spragia. Let me introduce you. Chad is a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analysis. He was the inaugural Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China, previously served as the director of the China Research Group for the US Marine Corps. He also served the US Indo-Pacific Command as the acting director of the China Strategic Focus Group and the country director for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mongolia. Mr. Spragia served in the US Marine Corps from 1985 to 2012, including as an assignment as the US Marine attaché within the US Embassy in Beijing. And Chad, you've been involved in direct negotiations with the Chinese side on crisis communications and it would be great if you'd describe past efforts, including those you were involved in, to try to establish crisis communications mechanisms that are more functional between Washington and Beijing and share some of your observations on the difficulties of having the US and Chinese militaries engage on some sort of meaningful and productive dialogue on this topic. That's really wonderful. I have to start like my colleagues did with just thinking the US Institute of Peace for hosting this. It's a great opportunity and certainly it's humbling to be on the panel here with my colleagues. Although as I was thinking through this conversation at this point, and you'll hear me echo a little bit of what's already been presented is, it really reinforces why this is such a good topic to talk about, but also why it's utterly the wrong topic to talk about. Which normally in the United States you would think is you can't say both of those things, but Chinese use dialectic logic and contradictions are accepted and now my job is to try to reconcile that and I'll try to do that a little bit over through some of the points I raised. And I think that you'll see it makes sense in the end. And I'll try to do that in a couple ways. I'll raise a couple more challenges that I've observed and then some remedies I think, and hopefully a little bit of some practices that I've gone through. One is I need to really reinforce this point of, what are the mutual challenges of establishing inter-sustaining effective mechanisms that can be used in a political military crisis and how might those be overcome, right? And so I'm going to say this and I've said this for 20 years, but the US and Chinese political systems are just different. Political cultures are different and we often say that, but in practice my observation has been with many diplomats from all the domains of the United States is they hear those words and then they sit in front of the Chinese and they immediately expect things to be just like it is in the United States. So there's a tremendous amount of mirror imaging bias that just kind of goes into this and until you accept that and understand it, their system is just different. Fundamentally is different in many ways, not always, there's overlap, but when you are a US military officer or defense leader or diplomat from the State Department and you sit across the table and you think, well, I'm here to negotiate and I have patterns of how we're going to do that and there's accepted behavior because I do that with all the other countries in the world that I interact with and those are all pretty much the same and pretty friendly and collaborative and we'll figure something out and with China it just doesn't work. And in the case of the Department of Defense one is, and this goes to the heart of crisis communication is the Department of Defense has, each individual that you have as an interlocutor oftentimes has a tremendous amount of authority and responsibility and really free play to interact and say what they feel and talk and being at OSD, much of the sugar in OSD, I don't want them free playing as much but I can tell you is that that is just not gonna be, can't be reciprocated by the Chinese side is that there's tight constrictions and restrictions on what they can say, it's a political military, it's not a national military and those constrictions are real and you have to understand and contend with those. It doesn't mean that it's impossible to get things done unless you accept that. And my wife is a part-time psychologist and she'd say that's recategorization or decategorization where you try to make a connection, I'm just an old Marine. I'm gonna talk to another old Marine and we're gonna solve this thing. We say, well no, it doesn't work that way. They're political, they're a party member and you have to understand that. So injecting that mirror imaging bias is what that does is that leads to establishment of poorly formed expectations and goals and what ends up happening is it generates frustration over time. I couldn't get anything done, it was just talking points. We never really got to solve anything. It's like, yeah, you're right, you didn't. There's gotta be a better way than there often is. Another thing I think we have to highlight is certainly as China is dynamic and it's been changing but the truth is for as long as this activity has been going on, I think my observation of looking at China is they're really only kind of now getting to the point where a lot of these procedures and systems within China are maturing enough where you can actually do things in a way that may be more understandable or predictable by the United States. Really, unfortunately at a time where you're starting to hear more in the United States, just say, I'm done. I've been doing this for 20 years, it hasn't worked and now I wanna shed doing these, it's just a waste of time. And the truth is the Chinese systems for these things are just have not been mature for a very long period of time. When I was an attaché in Beijing in the mid 2000s is the PLA and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs almost never talked, they never engaged and they were de-conflicted. It was very difficult to get them together and there was a lot of stove piping across the entirety of their system. That condition has changed significantly since then where you have much greater diplomatic alignment, theoretical alignment, practical alignment, systemic alignment. In one case that I've watched quite closely is the Chinese national security system and capabilities and what they're doing in aligning all facets of national security where members from these different organizations sit, they align policy, they're developing out those mechanisms to include as reported in the 20th party congress is a crisis communication mechanism and early warning mechanism, legal mechanisms and policy mechanisms that just simply didn't exist 20 years ago that they now have that are now maybe give us an opportunity to plug into China in a way in a manner that we just simply haven't had in the past. And China's NSS is really only 10 years old so staying up to date and kind of understanding where that's at is important but not letting these kind of legacy problems and failures tell us that we shouldn't try to keep working at this problem into the future but it certainly has been conditioned of why we've faced challenges in the past. Michael hit on both the speakers previously kind of hit on this which is these large degrees of mutual mistrust. You are not gonna build a long-term personal relationship with your Chinese interlocutor and substantive in a way that's gonna move the needle a tremendous amount. They can be very polite or they can be very friendly but they're not necessarily your friend. There's a tremendous amount of mutual mistrust and you need to understand the roots of that and whether you think that you have your own tiny domain of interest that you're working with the Chinese on it doesn't supersede the broader strategic context of mistrust that embodies all of these interactions which tends to force things to be much more transactional at times and that's really the characterization of crisis communication as well. You say well this is about two ships that almost bumped into the Taiwan Strait. It's like well no it's not really. It's about the broader strategic mistrust that's ongoing and this is a symptomatic reflection of this broader kind of disease that we have. So let's concentrate on not trying to necessarily solve that symptomatic feature of it but what the larger cause is and recognize that you might not be able to. So one other and kind of related to that is China's view of as their national security theory talks about is it's holistic, it's comprehensive. I think that's actually kind of a part of China that in some cases might be helpful but there's a feature of that that probably makes it increasingly difficult for us which is that they will evaluate any action proposal initiative or discussion that you might have to include crisis now has to be vetted by all domains of their security which is now supersedes 16 areas of national security and until those kind of checks and vetting are done across all of those it's hard for them to come back to you with an aggregate assessment of what this means, what they should do about it. I think that injects time lags into it which in time compressed scenarios is not helpful. You may have less opportunity now to say this is just a military thing we need to concentrate on this because this is a really big problem that's going to sideways very quickly. Well no I may need to go check resources or some other kind of security realm and that practice I'm a bit concerned that that might actually slow the crisis communication capacities down pretty significantly so. One thing that I would say is not a challenge which is often highlighted and I think Merritt's addressing is you often hear calls for well we have a defense telephone link but we need a red phone. I need a red phone that's the key and if we had the red phone it solves all these other ills and I think about this a lot of had to think about this in office is well what would a red phone do for me? I can call China, I got cell phones, modern place, I can call anybody I want who will pick up. It's not the connectivity issue that's really at the root of this, it's who will pick up, why they would pick up, are they authorized to pick up, how do you get them to be that way? The procedures we have for the DTL probably suffice. I think it's worth pursuing some kind of so-called hotline or a red phone but I've always had a difficulty understanding who on the Chinese side would be the person that would pick that phone up. What would be their authority to talk? One thing I know is it's not the PLA probably unless you constricted the communications that would go through that system to be a very narrow, very constricted set of discussion points. To be honest, I'm not sure on the US side who would have the red phone on their desk to talk. Would it be the Secretary of Defense? Can you imagine, Secretary of Defense? I mean, I have to post a translator next to him all day and a policy officer, just 24-hour watch. I mean, I'm not sure is it IndoPaycom? Is it the joint staff? It becomes a very kind of difficult mix of who would talk to where. I think that there's a version of that but one thing I'm pretty confident of is it's not a lack of hardware or mechanical or electronic interfaces. It's a procedural issue that you have to work through. So I find it tedious for people to say, oh, well, you just kind of need to get along. You just got to figure it out. I can't stand when scholars or academics or others say that, so I'll try to avoid that. But I will say that you're watching all this activity and the concentration on this topic and I find it fascinating. There's a lot of energy, it's going in a lot of directions. I think there's a lot of uncertainty about where it is going. It reminds me there's an American psychologist named Roldo May that said something to the effect of an ironic feature of humans is that when they've lost their way, they tend to run faster. And I think about that because we're doing a lot of things. We have a new special committee, there's a lot of activities, there's a lot of academic writings on this and there seems to be an urgency and I don't think the urgency is misplaced but I do know that working with the Chinese over time there is a feature of patience and sobriety and sophistication and making sure you're doing it in a much more deliberate way and there's a caution to running and just flailing in any direction and I'm not sure if that's always the best way to do that. In the case of crisis communications, these repeated calls to do crisis communications or establish guardrails, I think in some ways and I'll try to explain here in a second that actually frightens the Chinese off and maybe if the point would be is I think we have to consider about kind of de-centering about our discussions about crisis communication. So do we want crisis communication with the Chinese? Absolutely. When you introduce that term to them and I think we've seen this in the past practices, it scares them to death for the same reason that putting safety nets underneath of acrobats makes acrobats go higher and the Chinese have an aversion to that. They don't want the other side to go higher and it seems to be at times that their gambit is is we'll keep the safety net out and it'll keep you from taking more risks in the United States. The practice that I've seen when we've talked to them and have tried to establish some of these crisis communication mechanisms is their first response is I don't want to talk to you about crisis communication because if I do then you'll induce more activities to generate a crisis because you'll have a safety net. So why in the earth would I do that? And we have to come back and well, we're both getting out and about more. There's more chances for miscommunication, misperception. Don't you need something in place? And their reaction was in a very kind of dialectic way is we need to talk about how to solve root causes to make policy decisions that can't accept that a crisis occurred but if the only path that you're on is to avert the immediacy of the crisis, the exigent circumstances and doesn't get after the root causes of why those things are generated then I really don't want to talk to you. And so I think it would be better going back to my original contradiction at the beginning is yes, it's a great topic but perhaps we should be thinking about crisis communications in a way that's embodied in something that probably is more acceptable to the Chinese in this light and maybe to us as well. Maybe that's intolerable for us. I'm not sure, but I can tell you one thing is the Chinese are not gonna talk to you about crisis communication until you embody it in a process or a system that allows for the addressing of crisis communication but brings you into something that helps address at least tables resolution and policy issues long term. And I think that's one of the things that we did with the Chinese in 2019, 2020 that achieved acceptance. And one of the, as we were talking earlier off the panel is including track 1.5 and track one dialogues is a mechanism to address issues that are just not, they're intractable in track one for us and the track 1.5s are private but yet still allow you to explore and trial balloon issues that can be fed back in and allows you to get past kind of minimalist, maximalist positions in steady state and then in crisis can be something you can turn to to help provide solutioning as well. And so I think there's a body of that but I think it looking at it in a grander totality rather than just crisis. So I think that's enough to pause there but hopefully they give some fruit for thought why this is a great topic and yet at the same time kind of maybe misplaced or we need to broaden our thinking about it a little bit. Thank you. That's fantastic. Carla, do you mind if I add one more? Yes, I want to now give you all a chance because that was all of you presented such rich ideas and I want to give you all an opportunity to comment on each other's comments briefly but with the goal of trying to help the audience understand from your perspective where we should go to try to do something about this. Many of you talked about building trust. That was a theme across your three presentations and that there are, it's not enough to just focus on the mechanisms themselves. So where do we begin? How do we start to solve this problem when there is urgency? There are fighter jets bumping surveillance planes that kind of thing in the air that could lead to an inadvertent crisis. So I'll give you the opportunity to start. So I just want to pick up on the last thing that Chad was saying and I think that again, this is a matter of getting the two decision-making systems to understand one another better will help work on this problem in a practical way and just my personal observation is from literally every track two and track 1.5 scenario that I have watched that was bilateral. At the very beginning, US team comes into the room together and it looks like if anybody's seen the West Wing or any other US national security drama, they go, okay, Mr. President, here's where the ships are. Here's what happened 30 seconds ago. Here's where, et cetera. And the Chinese team sits down and the leader of the team starts with, all right, let's go around the table and decide what we want the principles of resolving this crisis to be two different directions. And so getting decision makers who don't have any previous experience cross-culturally because you're never gonna have that, right? You're never gonna be in the situation room in the White House and have everybody have a deep China background, right? So just having some ways to normalize that kind of intercultural thing, I think is really critical to solving that stuff. And then I just wanna bring up something that we didn't touch on at all, any of us really, which is that you cannot discount the significance of public opinion in China to crisis management. A brilliant and eccentric colleague of ours once said years ago, if I were on the Politburo Standing Committee, the only thing I would think about all day from the moment I woke up to the moment when I went to sleep was the idea of 650 million starving peasants. And that is, you know, the more CCP has tried to control the media environment in China, the more important controlling narratives about crises has become because they are shaping it into being mostly an opportunity crisis where you get to win something out of it or an existential crisis where you could suffer from it. And we really have to think about that, and meeting them halfway because usually it's not as big of a deal here, right? And I think that's an actual practical thing that US decision makers should think more about when engaging with Beijing. Well, we're gonna turn to our speakers but I wanna invite questions from the audience both here in Carlucci Auditorium at USIP but also from the online audience. And I think that you will have an opportunity to pass questions to some of our staff here in the room or if you're online to use the chat function to submit questions. But Michael, over to you, where should we go from here? What should we be doing? Well, I think as much of the commentary has indicated already, the first thing that has to happen is there has to be a clear conceptualization of what is crisis management and what are its objectives? Because as we've already seen, there's a real gap between how the Chinese think about crisis management and how the US thinks about it based upon, to a great extent, suspicion and the Chinese assumption that as Chad says, all we wanna do is create a safety net underneath a crisis that allows us to escalate further. And the Chinese wanna talk about crisis avoidance. They wanna talk about crisis prevention. How do you first not have that crisis? Now, of course, for the Chinese, what that means is stop sticking your nose in the Taiwan issue when we won't have any crisis. So obviously the United States is not going to do that. But you still, I think, need to have a dialogue that talks about, okay, is there an area where a crisis dialogue has utility for both sides? And what is the basis of that understanding? On what basis would you have that discussion? Now, on the track two level, you don't have this kind of level of problem. A lot of the people we interact with on the track two level get it in the sense of they understand that even though there's suspicion about American motives and having, the net underneath and all that is there, they still also understand that a crisis can escalate in ways that neither side wants or intends that puts you in an impossible situation where you have to then double down on certain types of signaling that could make it very much more likely that you end up in a conflict. And regardless of what you think about the ultimate purpose of the intent of crisis management and whether it escalates or not, in a broad conceptual sense, you want to avoid that kind of dynamic. So what you first of all have to do is you have to define and understand that crisis interactions is about perceptions. It's not about an engagement between two ships on the sea. That's part of it in terms of avoiding incidents, but it's about perceptions. It's about and not particularly military perceptions. It's about the perceptions that dominate among the civilian leaders who will be making the most critical decisions in a crisis. How do they conceive of managing, getting out of, or avoiding any crisis? What are their general guidelines about doing that in terms of their own interests and how the US works and in terms of the Chinese interests? So you have to have a holistic understanding of what crisis management is about that spans across the military and the civilian realm and focuses very much on perceptions and misperceptions based upon images and other types of things. I think that's the first and most important thing you have to do in trying to have progress on crisis management. So that means basically, you don't just give it over to the two militaries. I mean, there's a lot of basic biases and assumptions that are particularly evident within our two militaries that make it increasingly difficult for us to communicate on this topic. So the first thing I would say is you have to expand the scope of crisis dialogues. You have to bring in civilian individuals who are not just based upon military movement and military defense, kind of things that Devin was talking about, but who think in terms more broadly about national security decision making, about how their governments operate in the broader sense of the word and about what the biases are that we come to. So crisis management, from my perspective, crisis management or crisis prevention is really about education. It's about educating leaders to understand where the real problems could be in any kind of a crisis dialogue, whether it's prevention oriented or it's management oriented, you wanna be able to educate leaders who could be in decisive positions on what they need to avoid and what kind of assumptions that they may have, which actually could be pretty damaging. And both sides need to have that kind of a dialogue. So I think it's first you start off with that. Thank you. Chad, do you wanna add to your comments earlier? Yeah, I think, I'll try to address this question about the necessity for a crisis mechanism of some sort, something that can handle a crisis in the moment and then longer things that may be more acceptable. And so I think, like Michael said, I think it's spot on is that there are much more folks about crisis avoidance or crisis prevention, a little bit of crisis management. And ironically is that when we approached the Chinese to establish a crisis communication mechanism, we later learned, as I mentioned earlier, we probably misnamed that thing. It shouldn't be crisis communication mechanism, it should be a crisis prevention mechanism of some sort. And after a lot of back and forth is, it was only when we could establish the procedures in ways by which you would attend to crisis and that we could pin that to a separate dialogue mechanism that you could kick crisis into once they're resolved to do a more long-term policy resolution. It was only when you connected those two, I don't think you can squish them into one. It's too hard to manage crisis and then try to, because it requires too much accommodation in the moment, which is probably not viable. But if you can agree to back down, back off, cool this thing over and now we'll take it into a form where we can resolve this thing hopefully for the long-term, maybe not, but at least we're not gonna kill each other at the moment. I think that that's probably a model that they can work is that you kind of have to have kind of, which kind of fits Chinese dialectic thinking anyways, and a lot of their kind of unity of two opposing concepts of working in a dynamic together, they kind of fit that. And I think that certainly satisfied us is we got the crisis mechanism that we were hoping for and they kind of got the side that they worked for and it actually kind of worked. So I think that was a good archetype. It's now been abandoned here recently, but that may be something in the future we think about. I also need to echo the comments of, and I'll spin it in a little bit different way, which is we really do not have a deep bench in the United States working on this issue, particularly within the US government. So scholarly and academic community has much greater depth. We have great legacy of folks who are now retired and working, but active folks within the system, we're just not building them. We don't have the interactions. We don't have the practices at hand, the familiarity. I was very fortunate having worked with Mike, who ended up being my counterpart, that I had known him for 15, 20 years. And, but that's not the case. In fact, there's very few people like that now on the US side. And you really should recognize that as a leader says, I have to remedy this. We need to build this bench out so that there's a system to grow people over time that have consistency and a long-term kind of continuity with the topics, which are really kind of central to deepening your understanding of China and understanding of the maturation of policy negotiations and bargaining over time. So without asking you to shine too deep into the black box chat. And I just ask, in your fairly successful dialogue with the Chinese, were there civilians involved as well? As Michael described, was it a broader dialogue or was this really a military-to-military interaction? This was undertaking as a means to rectify longstanding and really kind of eroding US-China defense relations that had built up a series of okay mechanisms that have either fallen under use or were not providing the utility that they were intended in the first place. And it was recognition that the dynamics of the relationship were changing, that things risk and crisis opportunities were more likely in the future. And it was really a call for action of we need to fix this. We can't continue to do what we're doing. And they accepted that. So that was an idea of working just between really the two defense enterprises. But this was something that we shared certainly with the White House and State Department as others. If it worked, it could be a model. Although I'll highlight, again, is the Chinese system is just different. Xi Jinping does sit as the chair of the CMC responsibility system and therefore he really does sit in a decision-making role within their military, which is different than ours. And so there is a kind of an isolated element of Xi Jinping authority and governance structure of just the PLA that you kind of have to, there's gonna be a part of that that matters. Although I do agree, and it seems to be the case with the bill out of the Chinese national security system, is that we probably need to start marrying that. Chinese are marrying us, but in terms of thinking about crisis communication and probably the target for this may be going and working with their national security elements in a more holistic way that would include civilians and stop thinking about it as just a U.S., China military issue. I think that's where we probably need to go. I mean, part of the problem, if I could just add, to have this holistic concept, you really, at the senior levels of the U.S. and Chinese government, there has been recognition by the presidents that we need to improve crisis management. They've made statements coming out of meetings to do that. So it's sent a signal down through the system to try to improve it in some way. But then, to a certain degree, I mean, you've had the progress that Chad talks about, but also some deficiencies, but it's then left up to the functionaries to sort of try to sort of work out what that means. And in many cases, it's become a mill, mill issue. And part of the problem there, and I'll tell you an interesting anecdote, years ago, we got done with our crisis management event and we went to see the Vice Foreign Minister in China, Vice Foreign Minister, who was a supporter. You may remember, because I think Devin was there. So we're sitting there on the table with, you know, Doryli at big seats, all the whole thing. And he says, so, okay, what have you been learning? And I said, well, we've been learning that there are problems in our ability to communicate in a crisis. And he said, no, there aren't. We don't have problems communicating with our American counterparts. We have a very clear communication line with them. We know how to communicate with them. So, you know, is that really what you're talking about? You see, he saw what I was saying as kind of a threat to his responsibility area. His responsibility as a diplomat, as a senior official in the foreign ministry, is to communicate. We're basically telling him that he's not doing that now, effectively. I had the same kind of reaction from an official in the State Department whom I spoke to after this time. And I talked about crisis communication and problems in communicating. And the answer I got was, oh, but we've got a hotline. So, you know, that kind of, we got that side covered. So the idea that there's a perceptual problem about assumptions and biases and such that goes far beyond mechanistic tools of talking with each other or a simple mill, mill dialogue, that kind of understanding is what needs to pervade, really needs to, you know, get into the sort of thinking of functionaries across the board, not just within the military, but in these, particularly in the State Department of Foreign Ministry systems. But also to pick up on what Chad said before too about it's not just, it's not the phone, it's who answers it, or do they? And we've had repeatedly these sort of, I don't know if you've had them yourself on the, you know, track one side, but Michael can attest to the fact that we've had these bizarre conversations over and over again where because of the opacity and the rapid sort of change in informal responsibilities regardless of what paper structures are in the Chinese system, we keep, we're always asked like, okay, but so yeah, the National Security Council deputies committee meets and they prep something and they kick it up to the principles. But what really happens? Who really decides? We're like, no, we really do like publish our processes and we pretty much follow them. Of course, you know, politics and, you know, more and less influential people, but more or less you can read about how the US National Security Decision-Making Process works at the highest civilian levels. What happens when they close the doors at Zhang Anhai? Right now we're pretty sure Xi Jinping makes the calls, but it's, you know, it's not clear even to a lot of senior people within their own system. So that makes, you know, it's not the same dynamic there. Yeah, you have another comment? No, no, no, I was just gonna give you a question. I think Chad, I think was gonna make a comment. No, it was a brilliant comment, but I actually got so enthralled at his point, I kind of lost my train of thought, so. I wanna pick up on some of the questions that the audience has been sending us. One of them related to how do you build trust and that's come up. That gets to a question that came out of a discussion I had a few days ago, sort of during the Cold War, there was not a great deal of trust between Moscow and Washington, yet there were effective, at least we perceive them as effective mechanisms. Just to put those two together, you talk about building trust between the US and China to enhance crisis prevention, but at the same time we managed in an even more fraught in some ways dynamic with the Soviet Union to keep the world from a nuclear crisis, from escalating to a nuclear crisis through some pretty dangerous, sailing through some pretty dangerous shoals at times. Any comments on that, Michael, and then we'll go line here. I think you can overdo the emphasis on trust. I mean, we're never, as Chad suggested, we're never gonna get to a relationship, I don't think, with the Chinese under our current systems, where we have a high level of trust that everything the other side says is exactly what they mean and is exactly the truth and they're not trying to manipulate us. I mean, you're always gonna have some kind of suspicion, but you can reduce the degree to which you immediately discount what the other side is saying, that you think it's all about manipulation, which is what I hear from people in Washington quite a lot now. I mean, there's no real point in talking to the Chinese because all they're trying to do is manipulate you and you don't really get anything by talking to them. They're just gonna, if you have an agreement, they'll just violate it, et cetera, et cetera. So this is extremely a negative kind of assumption about what motivates the other side. I think you can deal with that by being able to establish a steady stream of interactions where you are doing insane things that then turn out to be the case, that it's not the opposite of what you say is what happens, that in fact, when you agree to do something and you can start relatively small, it gets done and the two sides do agree, if you do this, I'll do this. And that doesn't necessarily depend upon deep levels of trust. It depends upon the idea that if the other side is constantly second guessing you, no matter what you're saying or trying to do, they're gonna try and do something that's gonna undermine your position. They're gonna, because they think you do have nothing but bad will towards them. So they're gonna try and generally undermine your position. If you have a situation where you recognize there are certain outcomes that you can both benefit from, mutually benefit from, and then you are good to your word and you respond, they respond, then you can build up a system of reciprocity and mutual understanding if not trust. So I think that's the way you have to look at it and not sort of, because when you use the word trust, immediately people will just say, oh, this is ridiculous. I mean, you can't have trust in this relationship. And that's the wrong way, I think, of thinking about it. We're looking for questions from all of you in the audience and I think Brian has a question, but let's just go down the line here and then we'll take a question from Brian in the audience. Oh, I have nothing to add to what Michael said. It was that, Brian. It was. Chad. Yeah. That's such an important point, the risk thing, the trust issue. So you're just never gonna get there, although we have to be really cautious as we kind of change our thinking a little bit, which is we're never gonna get that. They're never gonna change. It's never gonna work. Well, you keep trying to do the same thing. It's not working. It's, for God's sake, we're Americans. We're supposed to be, this shouldn't be a cause to give up, innovate, figure it out, solve it, do the math here and make and keep working, not to shed your own principles and priorities. But there's one other point I think it matters here too, which is there's a danger of falling into the trap that if we can talk to the Chinese a lot, then crisis is avoided. And there's not a magical correlation between those two. There's been periods where we talked to the Chinese a lot and we still missed the crisis that emerged. And there's been periods where we weren't talking to them a lot, but we're very attentive and could avert those crisis. And so this is when people talk about it. Well, we have to install some kind of hotline because we have to talk. We've got to get these talks back in schedules like in the mid-2000, 2008, the Taiwan election period and we were having the most engagements that we've had in decades during that period. It ultimately missed the Chinese anxiety that was just boiling up at that time. And so it's not enough to just talk. You have to be attentive. You have to listen. You have to understand and feedback. It really matters. Because of the format, we're gonna have to wait a moment to get Brian's question, but there's been a question here from an online, I think someone in our online audience about convergent crises and the risk of convergent crises. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I could imagine they might be interested in a risk, say, of a Taiwan and South China Sea crisis or there are a lot of flash points in the Western Pacific. And maybe an assessment of those risks in an environment where we have a number of elections in the region that could really shift political dynamics. If there are, you have comments for the audience about what you see as the risks of multiple crises emerging and sort of the timeline for those if you're willing to go there. As we face 2024 election in Taiwan and some political change changes in other parts of the region, including Indonesia, where China has tensions over maritime rights and so on. Well, I mean, you certainly, potentially you have the possibility, given the fact that we have some significant differences with the Chinese that address certain areas, range of different areas in Asia in particular. And they go all the way from the Korean Peninsula all the way down to Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. And also over into the differences on behavior activities in the Indian Ocean, et cetera. You could conceivably get a convergence of different crises occurring at the same time. Now, that's a question of how likely is that, what are the conditions in which that might occur, et cetera. But I think it's hard to predict to that. I mean, it's possible, I don't think it's highly likely you're gonna get a whole series of similar crises occurring exactly at the same time. But the problem I think really is, when you look at crisis management is, because we've addressed this at times, if a crisis occurs in one area over a particular issue, is there a situation under which one or both sides could create a crisis somewhere else in order to affect that crisis, that original crisis? And you have a escalation or vertical, horizontal escalation rather, of crises in order to try to manage a crisis or deal with it more effectively. That's a legitimate issue. I don't think it's a terribly likely kind of a situation, frankly. Because I don't see the immediate reason why either the United States or China would think that they would gain a particular advantage by beginning a crisis in some other area. More than likely, it would probably just intensify the existing crisis and make it more difficult to manage by adding some other crisis to it. And the likelihood of conflict could arguably then go up. So, although I think it's theoretically a possibility, I don't see it as being a really likely one. There's an irony to this, which is both sides are desperately concerned about that very condition. Well, if China does something in Taiwan, or if something happens in Taiwan, well, they trigger North Korea and we agonize over this. And the Chinese do exactly the same thing. In fact, I think to even a more intense degree, which is they have a term of art for essentially what is a sympathetic crisis or some second order crisis that occurs that would be generated from that initial crisis. I think there's something to take away from that, which is the fact that when China has a crisis, one of its tendencies is to try to stabilize every other thing that on its perimeter or periphery and concentrate on that so that it can concentrate on that crisis. And having multiple crisis is a great deal of anxiety for them, so much so that they analyze every crisis they might get into. By the degree another one might occur, even speculating things that seem really implausible. But it's funny that both of our nations kind of do that, have the other ones plotting to do such a thing when in fact, both sides don't want that at all. But I think that's probably a good place when you start talking about crisis. Let me add one thing to that, which is when you talk about plausibility though, one of the things that we really haven't touched on because we've been very focused on political military crises is what is Beijing thinking when they look at how the United States has responded to Russia in Ukraine. I can foresee a layered crisis where you have the sort of traditional political military crisis that we've been talking about that then generates an accompanying economic diplomatic showdown such as what if we attempted to have the swift access for the CCP canceled? I mean, that would devastate the global economy basically. So this is really the first time that that type of economic cudgel has been used in direct coincidence with a military crisis. And so I wonder if I'm sitting in Xi Jinping's chair, what do I think about what might happen in the Taiwan situation on the economic front? Because I'm now watching it play out. And Chad made the point that alluded to China's concept of comprehensive security, holistic security, that this kind of, I think this is, these scenarios are probably being played out in Beijing and maybe even here in Washington of course. Question, a narrow question about CIA director Burns is visit to China and a specific question of the role of the Ministry of State Security and the role that it plays in this mix. Anybody wanna comment on that question? Yeah, you know, this particular instance is actually kind of illustrative and it seems to be an anecdotal data point at least of kind of supporting this hypothesis that in the future, the way that we have engagement structure or contacts and exchanges might start to center more between the two NSSs or two NSC's equivalents, unless so by the traditional kind of departmental-led contacts and exchange regimes that we've had in the place in the past, just simply due to the fact that that's really the way that the Chinese are moving. The fact that Burns went there tells you that there's something to that. Now maybe it was something different, but the Chinese have elevated the MSS. Tsai Chi is now the director of the general office that oversees not just the general office, but also the general office that manages the NSS. He's got background in that area. There's a lot of that influence. The 20th Party Congress, they've now elevated, the lead up to the 20th Party Congress, they've elevated security as a co-equal level of effort with developmental activities, but also started to integrate into the national security system this kind of public safety feature. So there's an even greater integration of MPS and MSS into that architecture. So I do think that there might be something there to think about. I think that's something good for US scholars or thinker watchers here to start saying, what are the dynamic changes? What does that matter to us? And how does that fit in potentially to some kind of future rubric for solving these things? In the past, there has been a dialogue between the US and the Chinese side through the intelligence systems of both countries. There was a lot of that, of course, going on during the existence of the Soviet Union when the United States was more aligned with China and dealing with the Soviet Union. We had an intelligence listening post in China at that time. And I've been told that over time there had been at least a buildup of a sense of familiarity between the two intelligence systems. They were able to communicate and exchange some level of information or confirm or disconfirm certain types of actions that each side was taken. And the familiarity that each side had with the other, even though it wasn't based on some deep trust, allowed them to be able to deal with certain problems that emerged between the two countries. They did not come up to the public level. I mean, the public was not really even aware of most of this going on. Maybe even some people within each government. But you nonetheless had that channel. And people, I mean, some time ago when we had a session of our project and we asked people, and they included people who had been former officials in the US government, fairly senior. And people on the Chinese side who were not as senior but who definitely had access. And we asked, what is the single most important thing that you think should happen? To try to improve the ability of the two sides to deal with the crisis. And it had to do with the consistency of interaction over time, that you build a certain level of familiarity. It doesn't necessarily have to be good buddy, hey, on your pal, we go out and have a drink together kind of thing, but you have a certain familiarity and the communication of a particular of your own country's interests and explanation of that. And the other side hearing that and giving an explanation of their own. They may not agree, but they have a way of communicating with each other. And that level of familiarity does build a greater degree of confidence to what the other side is saying you can believe in some way. And that doesn't exist now. We don't have that kind of channel, whether it's through the intelligence channel or whether it's through the economic and trade channel which we used to have through people like Hank Paulson or people on the Chinese side and the foreign apparatus like Da Binghua. You had that kind of consistent interaction between the two sides that were able to sort of clear up certain problems if they occurred. And we simply don't have that now. Do you all agree? See, that's noney. Yeah, I do. That actually gets to a question from the audience about the amount of information about China that we actually have and how that might pose a challenge or not to the question of managing or preventing crises. It sounds like a simple question, but it's a really important question. Almost every day that I wake up, I'm things that I knew for certain about China for 20 years or 30 years. I realized I was utterly wrong. So, you know, as confident as I can be that I know something about China, the next day I found out that it's false. I think we know a lot. I think that, you know, this is the place where I would call on the Chinese is, there's a lot more transparency on the Chinese that they could provide, recognizing the constraints that they have. And I'll draw this very personal to me is the Chinese have an office, the Office of International Military Cooperation. It's a public facing office that interacts with foreigners that's its main mission is diplomacy, yet I challenge anybody to even know who's the director, who are the deputy directors, who are the chiefs of the different regions. They don't do interviews anymore, they used to. Not many, but some, they don't interact, they don't make press statements, they don't write articles. I know something about these guys. If you thought you were really serious about doing diplomacy and crisis management, then wouldn't you want to showcase those things? I would call on them is to at least try to go back to the past practices and do better and talk and let us know who you are and what you're thinking, what your priorities are and to showcase that that's certainly something that I have a problem with. Do the Chinese understand us? Do they have enough information about us? Well, I think the answer to that is yes and no. In some ways they do, in other ways they don't. I mean, as I said in my remarks, I think the Chinese have this kind of deep belief that the United States is motivated by this desire to manipulate or weaken China continuously and seeks ways to do that because the United States wants to remain the dominant power in the world. So that sort of infuses all their interpretation and in some cases I don't think it should. In some cases I do think it tends to explain some of Chinese of US behavior, but not in every case. And the Chinese, I mean, one big thing that occurs, Devin sort of alluded to this in the simulations. Is that the Chinese tend to assume or tend to think that when a third party is involved in a crisis, if it's a US partner or US ally, that the US has direct control over that power. And so anything that third party does, the Chinese tend to interpret as being done at the behest of the United States or the US is in some way manipulate or the Chinese look at that and they say, oh, they're doing this third party is doing something, we, the Chinese, have to collaborate with you, the Americans, to control this third party because it tends to be doing something that we both don't like so you guys, we need to cooperate in doing that and the US resists doing that. So the Chinese have this kind of, they vacillate between these two views that third party wouldn't be doing anything unless you are getting them to do it to, well, they're doing this and you have to cooperate with us to stop them from doing it. Well, I'll just come back on that, Michael, and say that though we also always ask them to help us control the North Koreans. So it's not a, you know, it's a two. Oh yeah, it does go in both directions. So we tend to assume the Chinese have this kind of ultimate control over the North Koreans in everything they do, which I think is definitely not the case. But to broaden the information question for just a second, since we're running low on time here, I think in a broader sense than just like this sort of elite structural interpretations because I already talked about how they don't believe that we are honest in our publications of how our governments work. You know, the United States has got to be by any measure the most studied and examined population on earth in terms of polling on every subject, economic data, sociographic data in every way. And do we understand ourselves? So, you know, that would be the context I would put it in is, you know, you can never, how much can you ever know a nation of a few hundred million or a billion people? Thank you. Last word, Chad. I agree. How's that? Well, on that note of accord, let me thank all of you for a really an incredibly rich discussion. And this is some, I think the conversation we've had today is something that I'm gonna listen to again and again to pull out a lot of rich information and insights from decades of work, maybe a century of work. If we can, all of the years we've all spent studying China here on the stage. And thank you so much for a wonderful audience here in the room and online. Look forward to seeing you again here at USIP. Thank you.