For more than 20 years, the United States has been seeking ways to expand bilateral cooperation with China to help improve U.S.-Chinese relations. One of the most frustrating efforts has been in the United States’ attempts to build ties between the two countries’ military establishments. Since 1994, when then-Secretary of Defense William J. Perry proposed regular military-to-military exchanges, the Chinese have alternatively embraced such cooperation and later suspended it abruptly, usually to show their anger over U.S. actions such as continued American arms sales to Taiwan.
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