The annual Shangri-La Dialogue became a stage for competing demands on U.S. global power, including the war in Ukraine and tensions over Taiwan.
The competing strains on U.S. global power came into sharp focus at a security conference on Sunday, where China accused the United States of stoking tensions around Taiwan and the South China Sea, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine sought greater support for his embattled country.
These scenes played out at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual security forum in Singapore that has long been a barometer of the ups and downs of U.S.-China relations.
This year, the United States defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, and China’s defense minister, Adm. Dong Jun, held talks, something the top defense officials from the two countries have not always done at this gathering. But Admiral Dong made clear that China remained antagonistic to U.S. influence and alliance-building across Asia, especially American support for Taiwan, the island democracy that Beijing claims as its territory.
“These malign intentions are drawing Taiwan to the dangers of war,” Admiral Dong told the meeting after making an oblique but unmistakable reference to U.S. military and political support for Taiwan. “Anyone who dares split Taiwan from China will be smashed to pieces and court their own destruction.”
Admiral Dong’s warnings, and other combative comments from Chinese military officers at the meeting, reflected how far apart Beijing and Washington remain over basic issues, even as they discuss ways to keep military friction at sea and in the air from spiraling into crisis.
Last month, China held two days of menacing military exercises around Taiwan, accusing its new president, Lai Ching-te, of trying to advance independence for the island. Mr. Lai has said he wants to preserve Taiwan’s ambiguous status quo — self-governed, yet short of full formal independence — but Chinese officials describe him as a menace to Beijing’s claims to the island.
“I think that in essence it was a step toward Taiwan independence,” Lt. Gen. He Lei, a former vice president of China’s Academy of Military Sciences, said of Mr. Lai’s inaugural speech last month. “As long as he goes further and further down the road of Taiwan independence, going deeper and deeper, the dangers in the Taiwan Strait will only increase.”
Wen Lii, a spokesman for the Taiwanese president, said the Chinese officials’ comments in Singapore “willfully distorted” Taiwan’s position, and that the recent People’s Liberation Army exercises sent “a dangerous and irresponsible message.”
