By Zachary Keck
The last week has seen China engage in a ferocious amount of military diplomacy.
China’s military diplomacy has been heating up on all fronts over the past week or so.
Most notably, China is currently participating in the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise, for the first time this month. As previously noted, China sent the second largest delegation to the RIMPAC exercise this year. Its RIMPAC fleet includes the missile destroyer Haikou, the missile frigate Yueyang, the supply vessel Qiandaohu, the Peace Ark hospital ship, two helicopters and a dive unit, along with 1,100 personnel. More controversially, China sent an uninvited Dongdiao-class auxiliary general intelligence (AGI) ship to spy on the exercise just as it did for the 2012 RIMPAC when it wasn’t a participant.
Similarly, last week Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the chief of operations of the U.S. Navy, visited China. While there, he held meetings with his Chinese counterpart, Adm. Wu Shengli, the commander in chief of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). It was third meeting between Greenert and Wu over the past year. Moreover, Wu gave Greenert a tour of China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, during the trip. U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was given a similar tour of the aircraft carrier earlier in the year.
In a post-trip interview with the Wall Street Journal, Greenert also revealed that Wu asked him to reciprocate the gesture by bringing one of America’s aircraft carriers to China. According to the report, Wu asked Greenert to send the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier based in Japan, to a mainland Chinese port so that the crew of the Liaoning could get a tour of it. China is currently in the process of try.
“He’d [Wu] like his crew to get a tour of the George Washington and have the George Washington crew, a gaggle of them, come to the Liaoning,” Greenert told the Wall Street Journal. “I’m receptive to that idea,” he added.
The PLAN are trying to perfect the art of operating an aircraft carrier. The WSJ report noted that other Chinese sailors were given a tour of the USS Ronald Reagan, another U.S. aircraft carrier, during the RIMPAC exercise.
Read the full story at The Diplomat