US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rare presence in President Donald Trump’s entourage to Beijing signals a willingness on both sides to strengthen military communications to de-escalate and avoid crises, and suggests US arms sales to Taiwan will feature in talks, analysts say.
The Chinese experts expected Beijing to include Defence Minister Dong Jun in talks during the summit, with one source suggesting that Dong and Hegseth might also hold separate negotiations on the sidelines of the Xi-Trump summit.
The summit might include discussion of nuclear weapons and restoring and expanding military-to-military communication channels, they said.
Hegseth, who arrived with Trump aboard Air Force One on Wednesday evening, is the first American defence chief in decades to accompany a sitting president on a state visit to China.
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Zhu Feng, dean of the School of International Studies at Nanjing University, said Hegseth’s participation was likely to advance bilateral military communication mechanisms and crisis management.
Since Hegseth was taking part, Zhu said China would “at the least” bring in Dong, its minister of national defence, to the summit.
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In 2017, Li Zuocheng, then chief of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission (CMC), was the only PLA official present at the Xi-Trump summit in Beijing.