Systemic obstacles and possible solutions to crisis management between China and the US

As competition between China and the United States intensifies, crisis management is becoming a central issue between the two countries and their militaries. However, though both sides demonstrate strong will to strengthen crisis management, progress has been slow. As to the reason for this, previous academic studies mostly focus on the unit level and officials just engage in finger-pointing. This paper analyzes systemic obstacles to Sino–US crisis management and discusses the significance of these systemic factors for Sino–US crisis management approaches and methods. On this basis, this paper argues that the particularity of Sino–US military competition is unprecedented; the military competitions between other great power dyads in history, such as that between the United States and the Soviet Union, are not comparable. Thus, in the context of general peace among major powers, both China and the US must switch from building mutual confidence and removing mutual distrust to managing and controlling competition trends and surpass the efforts made by the US and the Soviet Union in the past.