Under the chandeliers of the luxurious Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore, the US and China have engaged in a few indirect verbal battles over the years.
The back-and-forth between US and Chinese Defense Ministers Lloyd Austin and Wei Fenghe this weekend was nonetheless of a different quality.
Friederike Böge
Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.
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Till Fähnders
Political correspondent for Southeast Asia.
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In light of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, the danger of a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan seems less abstract than it was three years ago, when the military, defense politicians and security experts from the Asia-Pacific region last met in the Southeast Asian city-state.
The conference, whose format is reminiscent of the Munich Security Conference, had to be canceled twice due to the corona pandemic.
Now it is re-emerging as the primary forum for the verbal showdown of the Indo-Pacific powers.
"Let me be clear: if anyone dares secede Taiwan from China, we will not hesitate to fight.
We will fight at all costs and we will fight to the end," said Chinese Defense Minister and General Wei Fenghe, who began his performance on Sunday with a snappy military salute.
The day before, Lloyd Austin had accused China of stepping up its "provocative and destabilizing" military activities near Taiwan.
This includes a record number of Chinese maneuvers around Taiwan.
"Our policy hasn't changed, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to apply to the People's Republic of China," Austin said.
Biden's warning in Tokyo
On behalf of many in the region, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida previously expressed growing concerns about a possible escalation in the Taiwan Strait.
"East Asia could be tomorrow's Ukraine," he warned in his speech at the opening of the forum.
A Chinese attack on the island is currently considered the most likely trigger for a military confrontation in Asia.
The warning recently issued by US President Joe Biden in Tokyo that America had committed itself to providing military support to Taiwan in the event of an invasion has given the issue additional poignancy.
Biden's statement was then put into perspective by employees of the American government.
Austin also tried to convey the impression of a continuous American policy on Taiwan.
The United States is committed to maintaining the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, Austin said.
The defense ministers of the United States and China met for the first time on Friday for bilateral talks on the sidelines of the conference.
A previous meeting was stalled over protocol issues because China's defense minister is ranked lower in his country's political hierarchy than the US defense minister in the United States.
According to press reports, the Americans recently took the view that talks are more important than the subtleties of protocol.
Much of the hour-long talk time was dedicated to Taiwan.
The fact that China threatens Taiwan with war in the event of independence is not new in principle.
As early as 2005, the People's Congress in Beijing passed a law that stipulated the use of "non-peaceful means" to prevent Taiwan's secession.
Even Xi Jinping's predecessors would have most likely started a war if Taiwan had officially declared its independence.
A "sacred duty" for Beijing
Since taking power in 1949, the Communist Party has regarded "reunification" as a "sacred duty."
For this reason, no government in Taipei has ever dared to officially declare itself independent.
A majority of the Taiwanese people reject such a step for the sake of peace, even though Taiwan has long been a de facto sovereign state.
The island's unresolved international status is a legacy of World War II and the Chinese Civil War.
A solution to the Taiwan issue has since been postponed to an indefinite future by China, Taiwan and the United States.
But how long?
At the Singapore conference, Defense Minister Wei Fenghe was asked whether Beijing would accept the status quo if Taiwan refrained from declaring independence.
He didn't have an answer.