- The US has released a trove of declassified photos and videos of Chinese intercepts of US aircraft.
- The US said the imagery shows a "concerted campaign" to use risky behavior to change US behavior.
The US Defense Department on Tuesday released a trove of declassified photos and videos it says show the aggressive and dangerous intercepts China is increasingly conducting against US aircraft over the South and East China seas.
The photos and videos show Chinese fighter jets flying alongside, over, and underneath US patrol and surveillance aircraft at distances of a few dozen yards to just 10 or 15 feet, including one encounter in May in which a Chinese jet flew in front of a US Air Force RC-135, jostling the reconnaissance plane in what US Indo-Pacific Command called an "unnecessarily aggressive maneuver."
"Since the fall of 2021, we have seen more than 180 such incidents — more in the past two years than in the decades before that," Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told reporters at the Pentagon.
"That's nearly 200 cases where PLA operators have performed reckless maneuvers or discharged chaff or shot off flares or approached too rapidly or too close to US aircraft," Ratner said, describing it as an effort "to interfere with the ability of US forces to operate safely in places where we and every country in the world have every right to be under international law."
Ratner spoke a day after Chinese jets intercepted a Canadian patrol plane as it flew near China to enforce sanctions on North Korea. During the encounter, a Chinese jet released flares near the front of the Canadian plane, which Maj. Gen. Iain Huddleston, commander of 1 Canadian Air Division and the Canadian NORAD Region, called "a very unsafe act."
Other US allies have reported similar incidents. Australia's military said in June 2022 that a Chinese fighter had intercepted one of its patrol planes over the South China Sea and released aluminum chaff that entered the plane's engine.
"When you take into account cases of coercive and risky PLA intercepts against other states, the number increases to nearly 300 cases against US, allied, and partner aircraft over the last two years," Ratner said, referring to China's People's Liberation Army.
Ratner called the intercepts "a centralized and concerted campaign to perform these risky behaviors in order to coerce a change in lawful US operational activity and that of US allies and partners."
Adm. John Aquilino, commander of Indo-Pacific Command, said only "a subset" of the 180 incidents were deemed "unsafe and unprofessional," a designation US officials apply to reckless and aggressive maneuvers by other forces.
Speaking alongside Ratner, Aquilino said what US officials have seen over the past two years "is a set of actions that have brought airplanes much closer together than are comfortable for those in the cockpit. In other words, flying off my wing at 15 feet for 45 minutes has too much of a chance to lead to an accident."
In a statement on Tuesday, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC, said China "has taken necessary measures in accordance with laws and regulations" in response to "provocative acts" by the US.
"The US military vessels and aircraft conduct frequent close-in reconnaissance on China, including 657 sorties last year in the South China Sea alone," Liu said. "We hope the relevant countries can refrain from taking adventurist or provocative moves and stop undermining China's national security and regional peace and stability."
The release of the imagery comes as China has largely frozen military-to-military dialogue. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Ratner, and Aquilino have met with Chinese officials over the past year, but Beijing has denied repeated requests for calls and canceled standing meetings.
"I've asked to speak with my counterparts, the Eastern and Southern Theater commanders, now going on two and a half years. I have yet to have one of those requests accepted," Aquilino said.
Last year, China canceled the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, "our operator-to-operator level dialogue about air and maritime safety," Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, said in December.
"That's a venue where we would normally be able to raise these incidents in great detail and also where the PLA, if they feel as though we've done something that doesn't live up to the standards of operating safely and professionally, would have their own opportunity to raise their objections as well, but they canceled it," Chase added.
Experts say that denying official meetings and performing aggressive intercepts are part of a strategy to raise the stakes for what China sees as unacceptable US activity.
"It's a form of struggle on the part of the Chinese — calibrated escalation to show to the US the risks and the costs of maintaining US military presence and activity in China's peripheries at frequencies that they object to," Amanda Hsiao, senior analyst for China at the International Crisis Group, said on a podcast in August.
"What's important is that I do think that the Chinese believe that it is calibrated, meaning that there is an assumption here that these encounters and interceptions that are a form of political signaling won't ultimately spiral out of control, and I think that's concerning and [an] underestimation of the risks," Hsiao said.
China has pushed back against what it describes as a US-led effort to inhibit its economic growth and limit its international influence.
In a speech in March, Chinese leader Xi Jinping made an unusually direct criticism, saying, "Western countries — led by the US — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement, and suppression against us, bringing unprecedented severe challenges to our country's development."
The aerial encounters have drawn comparisons to a 2001 incident in which a Chinese jet intercepting a US reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea collided with the US plane, killing the Chinese pilot and forcing the US plane to land in China. The US plane and crew were ultimately returned to the US, but officials are less confident of such an outcome today.
"The bottom line is that in many cases, this type of operational behavior can cause accidents, and dangerous accidents can lead to an inadvertent conflict," Ratner said Tuesday.