With the three-day Shangri-La Dialogue over, China’s decision not to send Defense Minister Dong Jun became a news story in its own right, shifting much of the outside world’s attention from the regional security conference itself to why China snubbed the event, as it did last year. The decision is a sign of China’s confidence in its own power—and its desire to avoid direct public confrontation with the United States.
China first began participating in the in 2007. Until 2018, China was mostly represented by a deputy chief of the general staff or a vice president of the Academy of Military Sciences, with the only exception being 2011, when the then-defense minister attended. Beginning in 2019, however, and excluding 2020 and 2021 when the forum was suspended because of the pandemic, China sent its defense minister.
With the three-day Shangri-La Dialogue over, China’s decision not to send Defense Minister Dong Jun became a news story in its own right, shifting much of the outside world’s attention from the regional security conference itself to why China snubbed the event, as it did last year. The decision is a sign of China’s confidence in its own power—and its desire to avoid direct public confrontation with the United States.
China first began participating in the in 2007. Until 2018, China was mostly represented by a deputy chief of the general staff or a vice president of the Academy of Military Sciences, with the only exception being 2011, when the then-defense minister attended. Beginning in 2019, however, and excluding 2020 and 2021 when the forum was suspended because of the pandemic, China sent its defense minister.
But last year, China was represented by a major general who serves as a vice president of the National Defense University. (Chinese military academics like this are their own breed, not command officials.) This year, the level of representation was lowered further, with the delegation led by Meng Xiangqing, a National Defense University professor with the rank of major general.
In earlier years, the defense minister attended in person because China needed to speak at international forums, project an image of openness, and seek understanding from neighboring Asia-Pacific countries and Western states about its defense policy. But the situation has changed. The military may believe that previous policy explanations failed to dispel outside doubts about China’s military transparency.
At the same time, China’s importance is now obvious enough that Beijing no longer needs to use this Western-led platform to send policy signals. Maintaining a minimal presence is enough; there is no need to give the Shangri-La Dialogue the endorsement of a defense-minister-level appearance.
If the defense minister had gone, there would have been little new for him to say, while his appearance could easily have created new points of controversy. China’s main security concerns are the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, China-Japan tensions, the Philippines, and the U.S. alliance system in the Indo-Pacific. But China’s positions on these issues are long fixed, and little has changed for Beijing’s position of late save for increased tensions with Japan.
This is especially true of Taiwan. It is not an ordinary defense issue to be re-explained by China’s defense minister at the Shangri-La Dialogue, but a core issue repeatedly and personally defined by Chinese President Xi Jinping himself.
If China’s defense minister attended the dialogue, he would essentially be repeating existing positions: opposing Taiwan independence, external interference, and bloc confrontation, while defending sovereignty and territorial integrity. If he spoke mildly, it would mean little. If he spoke forcefully, it would be portrayed, as in the past, as evidence of a hard-line Chinese military stance, be amplified by international media, and create new controversy. Sending experts and scholars allows China to say the same things with much less political weight.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue also showed that an open confrontation at the defense-minister level was not necessarily useful for China. His remarks sounded tough on China, but his warnings about Chinese military expansion were mostly old language from the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy.
It is especially notable that Hegseth did not speak loudly about Taiwan this time, avoiding the topic for the first time in over a decade in the U.S. appearances at the event. Washington did not want to use the Shangri-La Dialogue to push Taiwan back to the forefront of U.S.-China confrontation just after U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing.
Of course, the Chinese military could not have known the exact content of his speech in advance. But against the backdrop of a more conciliatory description of U.S.-China relations, it was predictable that Washington would not push its criticism of China to the highest intensity. There was therefore no need for Dong to attend simply to respond to Hegseth.
The U.S. defense secretary had recently accompanied Trump on his visit to China, meaning that U.S.-China security communication had already taken place at a higher level. Since the truly important communication had already taken place in Beijing, the Chinese military had no need to send Dong to Singapore to meet or spar again with Hegseth in a Western-led multilateral setting.
For the Chinese military, defense issues with the United States can be discussed, but the main venue should be Beijing, using the bilateral framework it prefers for security talks, not an agenda set by the Shangri-La Dialogue.
The structure of this year’s agenda itself did not require high-level Chinese participation. One of the issues discussed at this year’s dialogue was maritime security, along with the reliability of U.S. security commitments to Asian allies. These topics are inseparable from the Iran war, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and its impact on Asia’s energy supply.
In his opening speech, Vietnamese leader To Lam used the Strait of Hormuz as a warning, showing that the focus of this year’s dialogue was no longer limited to the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and U.S.-China military competition. It has become a question of America’s strategic capacity amid multiple global crises.
The United States is still fighting an unsuccessful war against Iran. On the one hand, it asks allies in the Indo-Pacific to cooperate in containing China; on the other hand, it is deeply trapped in the Middle East crisis. Asian countries will naturally ask: How much capacity and willingness does the United States still have to invest in the Indo-Pacific? Are its security commitments reliable? If Washington cannot even handle the Iran issue well, why should Asian countries continue to believe that it can simultaneously manage Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific?
Hegseth’s speech and responses did not dispel these doubts. Against this backdrop, China’s defense minister staying away helped prevent the conference from being recast as a confrontation between the two powers. Letting participants focus on America’s own problems served China’s interests better than having its defense minister appear.
China is going through a brutal military purge, and if Dong had attended the Shangri-La Dialogue, foreign media would very likely have asked about these issues. China’s defense minister would not have been able to give a real answer, while avoiding the questions would itself have become news.
Sending a National Defense University professor allows the discussion to be confined to policy explanation and academic exchanges, preventing the Shangri-La Dialogue from becoming a window through which outsiders observe the internal condition of the Chinese military. This may not be the main reason, but it must be part of the military’s calculation.
China is also working hard to build up its own Xiangshan Forum. The Shangri-La Dialogue is someone else’s platform. China does not control its agenda-setting, narrative direction, or media rhythm.
The Xiangshan Forum is different. It is China’s own defense and security platform. The Chinese military can determine the agenda, shape the narrative, and systematically explain the Global Security Initiative, its Asia-Pacific security outlook, and its vision of a multipolar order. Building up the Xiangshan Forum can further highlight China’s global influence.
Although its scale and influence still cannot compare with the Munich Security Conference or the Shangri-La Dialogue, it has gradually taken shape and acquired some clout.
China will, of course, still attend such forums and may even occasionally send its defense minister again in the future. But its participation will increasingly be about maintaining a presence and responding to outside doubts, rather than actively shaping the defense and security agenda. Beijing is increasingly unwilling to systematically explain its defense and security policy on such international multilateral platforms, and even less willing to respond, under an agenda set by the West, to outside doubts about the People’s Liberation Army’s military transparency.
