US, Chinese soldiers find common ground in disaster drills

Soldiers from the U.S. Army and People’s Liberation Army carry out a joint rescue response to a natural disaster in an exercise at Camp Rilea Armed Forces Training Center near Warrenton, Oregon, over the weekend

A man lay on the grass, shivering beneath his bloodstained T-shirt as Chinese military doctors and U.S. Army medics hovered over him, applying a splint and an IV. Troops nearby prepared to evacuate the injured.

On a pine-studded base along the Oregon coast, military units from two seemingly unlikely partners were carrying out a joint response to a natural disaster. It was only a drill, but the roughly 100 soldiers from China and the U.S. and their top commanders are ready to use what they learned in a real disaster, no matter the state of relations between the nations.

“The tensions that happen really don’t impact this, because we’ve found an area of common interest: that’s saving lives and disaster response and humanitarian assistance,” Gen. Robert Brown, commander of Hawaii-based U.S. Army Pacific, told reporters this week, the closing day of the exercise.

Washington and Beijing are striving to foster military ties to avoid a confrontation and potentially work together where their interests don’t collide. That’s despite a growing strategic rivalry between the two world powers and frictions over North Korea and China’s island building in the disputed South China Sea.

Maj. Gen. Zhang Jian, a senior commander who visited Oregon, said U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed hope during Trump’s visit to China this month that military relations can be a stabilizing factor. Zhang said the disaster exercises, which the U.S. and China host in alternate years, evolved from academic discussions to boots on the ground in the last few years.

“I think it is very positive in the fact that it can enhance mutual understanding, it can reduce the risk of miscalculation and misperception, and will definitely help to build a more secure and stable regional situation,” Zhang said through an interpreter, as Brown nodded.

U.S. and Chinese forces have not collaborated yet on disaster response, but Brown said he expects them to.

In the recent drill, the soldiers practiced responding to a massive flood. The skills also could help in an earthquake as they used a large drill to practice extricating survivors from a collapsed building, or in a tsunami.

It was the first time in the United States for most of the Chinese soldiers, who wore red flag shoulder patches on their uniforms. The Americans tried to make the Chinese feel at home as they carried out their mission. AP