What does China’s debut at RIMPAC mean?

The Heat

As China takes part in the world’s largest joint naval exercise for the first time, the nature of United States-China military relations may take on a new form.

At the Rim of the Pacific exercises in Hawaii, 22 countries and about 25,000 personnel are working to cooperate at sea.

This is the first year that China to take part in these exercises, perhaps marking a new milestone in maritime relations between the two countries.

CCTV’s Nathan King has an overview of the exercises, and how they will affect China’s relations with the U.S. as well as the other participating countries.

Twitter: @Nathanking

U.S. Navy Admiral Dennis Blair joined CCTV’s Asieh Namdar to discuss the meaning of these exercises from an American perspective.

Admiral Blair invited China to participate in the RIMPAC exercises about 13 years ago during his time as Commander in the Pacific Region.

Some of the areas that China and the U.S. could make progress in, according to Blair, are cooperation in both search and rescue and disaster relief procedures.

Blair gave insight into how cooperation between the two navies at these exercises will hopefully have positive impact on the future of U.S.-China relations.

“I hope the understand of each others’ armed forces can hopefully penetrate up into governments and make a difference.”

Teng Jianqun, director of the Center of Arms Control for the China Institute of International Affairs joined the RIMPAC discussion from Beijing for a Chinese perspective.

From Brussels, Deputy Director at the Wildfried Martens Center for European Studies Roland Freudenstein (Twitter: @RoFreudenstein) brought a European perspective.

While Teng stresses that the most important part of China’s participation in RIMPAC is military transparency, Freudenstein does not agree that China “is only doing constructive things with its naval forces at the moment.”