Unlikely interlocutors sit around the table at Beijing security conference

While most of China was getting ready last weekend for the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, Beijing’s International Convention Centre was thronged and bristling with gold braid, medals and epaulettes. Of the 1,800 or so delegates at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum, China’s annual military diplomacy conference, about half were in uniform, most of them senior officers from over 100 countries.
The theme was Promoting Peace for a Shared Future and some of the sessions carried similarly vague aspirational titles. But the focus during most of them was on the toughest security issues of our time, starting with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Other major themes included security in the Asia-Pacific, particularly in the South China Sea, the US-China relationship and the future of arms control. And there were sessions on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in warfare and the security governance of outer space.
Many of the most interesting encounters at the forum were not in the main sessions or in seminar rooms but queuing for coffee during the breaks. In front of you might be an expert on nuclear weapons systems while a senior military figure from Belarus stood behind you.
One afternoon I sat around a table with a Pakistani general, a US army officer, a former Afghan negotiator with the Taliban, a German expert on AI weapons and a Mongolian political scientist. Earlier that day a man I met over coffee told me about his more than 50 visits to North Korea.
Some of the panels brought together the most unlikely interlocutors, notably a session on European security that featured Ukraine’s former foreign minister Oleksandr Chalyi and Sergey Karaganov, a Russian political scientist who has called for Moscow to consider launching a nuclear strike against a Nato member state. A session on the Middle East included speakers from Israel and Iran, although they were not on the platform at the same time.
Beijing has been Moscow’s most important friend, economically and diplomatically, since Vladimir Putin fully invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But China is also Ukraine’s biggest export destination and relations have improved in recent weeks to the point where Volodymyr Zelenskiy could soon visit Beijing.
Nobody at the forum was predicting an early peace settlement but both Russians and Ukrainians said a pause in the fighting could be negotiated. Since Ukraine’s incursion into Russian territory in Kursk, Russian forces have made territorial gains in eastern Ukraine. Some experts in Beijing last weekend suggested that these Russian gains could offer Putin an opportunity to pause the fighting on the basis that his forces have secured most of the territory of the four Ukrainian provinces he has declared to be part of Russia. Neither Kyiv nor almost anyone else will recognise Russia’s claims, which have made a peace agreement harder to achieve than it was in Istanbul in the spring of 2022.
Even a pause in fighting would require external security assurances, most plausibly from the US and China. This could move Beijing out of its diplomatic comfort zone but it could help to repair other relationships, notably in Europe.
The US delegation at the forum was led by Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defence for China, Taiwan and Mongolia. And although he kept a low profile and avoided reporters he discussed a range of issues with Chinese military leaders, including security in the Asia-Pacific and how to manage the US-China relationship.
Direct contacts between the US and Chinese militaries resumed only a few months ago after a two-year silence caused by diplomatic tensions over everything from Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022 to the shooting down over the US of a Chinese surveillance balloon. Wu Xinbo, an expert on the US at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the forum that Washington and Beijing should create a joint committee of academics, experts and former officials to establish a complementary framework to the military-to-military dialogue.
Coming a few days after Xi Jinping welcomed 53 African leaders to Beijing for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the Xiangshan Forum also highlighted the country’s relationships across the Global South. Although China’s investment in Africa has a mixed legacy, Chinese experts, policymakers and investors speak about Africa in a way that is increasingly uncommon in Europe or the US.
While the EU negotiates deals to prevent Africans from crossing the Mediterranean, by incarcerating them if necessary, China sees the continent above all as one of opportunity. During a private session on the margins of the conference one Chinese businessman pointed out that Africa had a population of 1.5 billion, compared to China’s 1.4 billion.
He suggested that massive investment in infrastructure through long term, low interest loans could help the continent to build the basis for an economic transformation similar to China’s over the past 40 years. “They’ll have a population of two billion by the middle of this century and Africa, not Asia, will become the economic powerhouse of the world,” he said.