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英文原文：

For those watching the war in Ukraine and worrying that a similar conflict might occur in the Taiwan Strait, my response is simple: it’s the South China Sea, stupid.

With tensions in the Taiwan Strait rising, the South China Sea issue has seemingly died down. This is not the case. On December 21, a Chinese fighter jet and a US surveillance plane flew within metres of each other over the South China Sea. Both sides released video clips and pointed fingers at each other.

The South China Sea is far more dangerous than the Taiwan Strait. A war in the Taiwan Strait between China and the US, if it is likely at all, is very unlikely to be triggered by an accident like we have seen in the South China Sea.

The Taiwan issue is so flammable, every word from Beijing and Washington would be scrutinised. US President Joe Biden’s “gaffes” on defending Taiwan were quickly walked back by his aides, who insisted that the White House had not changed its one-China policy.

What if another fatal collision occurred in the air, like the one in 2001? For over two decades, bilateral talks on risk reduction between the two militaries have been just tit-for-tat, focusing on safety versus security.

The Chinese side points out that the United States’ reconnaissance is detrimental to China’s security while the US wishes to discuss ways to ensure safe encounters. The Americans ask Chinese ships and aircraft to keep a safe distance and the Chinese say, “You are certainly safe if you don’t come at all.”

What is happening today is very much like what happened during the Cold War. In the early decades of the Cold War, more than 100 American and Soviet pilots died as a result of air clashes. This led to the 1972 US-Soviet Incident at Sea agreement.

China and the US have similar agreements to reduce tension. But, in both cases, the agreements didn’t fully play their roles in risk reduction.

To avoid an accident, the eventual solution lies in an equilibrium of military strength. The real lesson from the Cold War is not the two superpowers establishing a litany of confidence-building measures to avoid accidents but that, because of the balance of power, both were willing to sit down to talk.

While the US and the Soviet Union were enemies of almost equal strength, China and the US are competitors with a military gap that is quickly closing. China has vowed to speed up building the People’s Liberation Army into a world-class military by mid-century.

The question is: what could happen before that? Short of an equilibrium, this might turn out to be the most dangerous time.

A few suggestions are already on the table. First, China could send ships on reciprocal surveillance and reconnaissance missions in American waters. Historically, Chinese ships did sail sporadically in the waters off Guam, Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands.

But how can the PLA Navy do that routinely along the American coast without a forward military presence such as bases? And why should it do that at all if China’s focus is on maintaining its legitimate rights and interests in the Western Pacific?

Second, China could amend its maritime law. Most countries in the world, including the US, allow innocent passage of foreign vessels in their territorial waters. Will China allow innocent passage in its own territorial waters one day? And if China does, would the US give up its freedom of navigation operations?

This is what happened after the 1988 Black Sea bumping incident in which two Soviet frigates were ordered to push an American cruiser and a destroyer out of Soviet territorial waters. In 1989, the US and USSR issued a joint statement agreeing that all ships, including warships, enjoy the right of innocent passage through the territorial sea of another. The decades-old rivalry at sea came to an end.

The easiest thing to do is to resume the military-to-military dialogues that China cancelled in the wake of former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. But it should not be business as usual.

The two navies have been talking to each other since 1998 and have done at least three exercises aiming for good seamanship. What is sorely needed are exercises to ensure good airmanship in an air-to-air encounter. Given the speed of today’s aircraft, it is extremely difficult to disengage in proximity.

According to the China-US memorandum on rules of behaviour for safety of air and maritime encounters, the pilots of both sides are responsible for operating with professional airmanship and paying due regard to the safety of the other side’s aircraft.

The two militaries should explore building confidence in new fields where the gaps are not huge. In a track II dialogue I attended, experts from both sides concurred that strategic stability, which normally refers to US-Soviet nuclear equilibrium, won’t be applicable to China-US relations.

Instead, China-US strategic stability has to include new fields such as outer space, cyber and artificial intelligence. Talks could start at the track II level first. The ongoing talks between the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University and the Brookings Institution on mitigating the risks of artificial intelligence in the military domain are a bold step in the right direction.

That the Cold War turned out to be a long peace is not sheer luck, but the result of the two superpowers being hell-bent on preventing a hot war. Similarly, the real challenge for China and the US now is not to avoid a new Cold War, but avoiding conflict most likely triggered by an accident. The latest incident in the South China Sea tells us that peace has to be earned.