The US denounces the "growing aggressiveness" of China in clashes of its patrols in Asia Pacific

The U.S. destroyer USS Chung-Hoon observes the "dangerous" crossing of a Chinese patrol boat Saturday in the Taiwan StraitMass Communication Specialist 1st Class Andre T. Richard (AP)

The White House has warned on Monday against what it considers a "growing aggressiveness" of China in waters that Beijing considers its own in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, after two clashes in the last ten days between patrols of the People's Liberation Army and US forces in the area.

The Pentagon has distributed this weekend images in which it is seen that a Chinese patrol ship zigzags in a "dangerous" way in the vicinity of a US destroyer, the USS Chung-hoon, in the Taiwan Strait, which Beijing considers part of its territory and where US forces carry out periodic patrols to defend free navigation. A similar situation had occurred ten days earlier, when a Chinese fighter jet came too close to a U.S. military aircraft, according to the Defense Department in Washington.

Such "unsafe actions" can end up causing an incident in which someone is injured, said the spokesman for the US National Security Council, John Kirby, at the daily press briefing of the White House. "They can lead to miscalculations when you have metal pots of that size, whether it's in the air or in the sea."

"If they operate so closely, it doesn't take much for an error of judgment or just a mistake to occur, and someone is going to get hurt. That is unacceptable, it should be unacceptable to them as well," he added. China, for its part, has assured that the maneuver of its ship was completely safe.

The possibility that these clashes are repeated and some could end up triggering a serious incident is one of the issues addressed this weekend by the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, during his participation in the international security forum Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, which every year brings together the top military leaders from around the world.

The Pentagon had tried to use that trip to hold a meeting between Austin and Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu. Beijing did not accept and the two officials did not get to sit down together to talk, although they did shake hands in a brief aside during a dinner.

Military contacts between the two great powers and systemic rivals remain suspended since Beijing canceled them following the visit to Taiwan, in August last year, of the then speaker of the House of Representatives and third in the presidential line of succession, Democrat Nancy Pelosi. Trying to restore those communications, Kirby said, "is one of the reasons" why the US government is pushing to reactivate the trip to Beijing of its Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. His visit was canceled in February, following the passage through US territory of a Chinese hot air balloon that Washington accuses of carrying out an espionage mission.

Two senior officials, Daniel Kritenbrink of the State Department and Sara Beran of the National Security Council, are currently in China as part of a series of trips and contacts between the two governments in recent weeks to try to get the deteriorating bilateral relations back on track. To the meeting in Vienna between the respective National Security Advisors, Jake Sullivan and Wang Yi, kept secret until its celebration, has been added the visit of the Chinese Minister of Commerce, Wang Wentao, to the United States. Last week it emerged that CIA Director William Burns had also traveled to Beijing last month.

US President Joe Biden had assured on the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Hiroshima (Japan) in May that "soon" there would be a détente in ties between the two countries. Biden and Xi had agreed last November, at a meeting in Bali during the G-20 meeting, to try to give new impetus to the bilateral relationship, of which Blinken's visit was going to be the most tangible step. The passage of the Chinese hot air balloon and its downing by the US Air Force put those hopes fallow.

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