Making Shao-Lin out of Shangri-La
American and Chinese Positions on the 2026 Dialogue
Authors
The 2026 Shangri-La Dialogue recently concluded, and a new, maybe temporary flavour of US-China rivalry was evident – one where, as a foreign journalist quoted in Global Times said, the “gunpowder smell” had dissipated and the US’s tone on China seemed softened. As many have speculated in the past few days, and likely rightly so, this is probably a downstream effect of the Trump-Xi Summit in Beijing in May 2026, and the need on both sides to talk guardrails and ‘coopetition’.
If one comparatively assesses US War Secy. Pete Hegseth’s SLD speeches from 2025 and 2026, the mention of China or the CPC has reduced from 27 times to 7 times. In 2025, Hegseth was highly brazen and confrontational on China at the SLD. He spoke about Taiwan 5 times in that speech, explicitly called out Beijing’s cyber theft activities and the PLA Navy’s “harassment” tactics in the South China Sea, and cornily promised that the US will “wrap [its] arms around [its] friends and find new ways to work together.”
This time around, Hegseth was so measured, it was unlike anything one may have seen from him or Trump 2.0 in the past year. He emphasised “mutual respect,” a “durable balance of power,” and that despite Washington having a “clear-eyed assessment” of China’s aggression and military buildup, its approach will “not [be one of]… needless confrontation.” Most importantly, but not surprisingly, he chided and derided the SLD and “conference mechanisms” themselves, and called on allies to stop “freeloading” off-of the American taxpayer.
Chinese media and analysts obviously had a field day. Firstly, Chinese representation at the SLD itself sent a message. As former Chinese ambassador Cui Tiankai said in the aforementioned Huanqiu article, ending a lower-ranking delegation of highly articulate military scholars (like Zhao Weibin and Meng Xiangqing) allowed China to play defence effectively without giving Washinton a high-ranking target to grill in public. Further, on Hegseth’s speech and US’s posturing, popular commentator Zhou Bo argued in a piece for Guancha, that the US has actively managed to cause anxiety in Manila and Tokyo. The fact that Hegseth went to SLD and made no mention of issues in the South China Sea, could be disconcerting.
Where Zhou makes a largely rhetorical point, is about the US effectively granting the status of absolute peer equal to Beijing, because Hegseth propagated a policy of “strategic stability.” It probably has more to do with conflict avoidance than granting regional primacy to China. Zhou also implies that because Trump questioned travelling 9,500 miles for a conflict, Washington is fundamentally capitulating on Taiwan. He misses the Rooseveltian “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick” strategy that Hegseth openly referenced, even though Trump’s post-Beijing Summit remarks do expose Taiwan to the stature of a bargaining chip.
It is true that SLD is a Conference for a lot of posturing and agenda-setting by more parties and voices than just the two big powers setting the rules of the game. But if anything is seemingly clear from the developments of the 2026 Dialogue, is that with Trump, China’s Summitry worked just enough to make those other voices matter much less.