In these tense times, a lack of loud war drums in Beijing and Washington has been a rare source of comfort. True, the drums are not quite silent. Some American generals and politicians have talked up the chances of conflict with China within a few years, which is less helpful than they may suppose. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighter jets keep staging recklessly close, high-speed passes to intimidate Western military aircraft in international airspace near China. The PLA refuses to discuss rules for safely managing close encounters, precisely because it wants to frighten foreign warplanes and ships far away. That shows a dangerous appetite for risk. America and China remain at loggerheads over a rather trivial crisis: the downing of an unmanned Chinese surveillance balloon. What hopes have they of managing a collision on a par with one in 2001 that killed a PLA pilot and obliged an American spy plane to crash-land at a Chinese air base?

       Still, when President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping met in person last November, they agreed on the need to avoid armed conflict. Chinese censors routinely silence online nationalists demanding attacks on Taiwan, for the masses have no right to dictate to Mr Xi when or how that island should be conquered. Chinese public opinion has not, to date, been readied to sacrifice decades of growing prosperity on the altars of war.

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