A China Southern Airlines plane takes off at Jieyang Chaoshan International Airport in South China's Guangdong Province on March 29. Photo: IC

The US has reportedly rejected Chinese airlines' requests to add weekly flights on the grounds of maintaining parity, the latest point of disagreement amid fraught bilateral relations.

The US has rejected the request by the Chinese airlines to maintain parity in scheduled passenger services between the two countries. According to Reuters, the US Transportation Department said it was willing to review the decision if Chinese aviation authorities adjusted their policies affecting US carriers.

Although US authorities stressed that the decision was just a "procedural matter" and wasn't meant to escalate tensions over travel restrictions, experts said that it was a reflection of worsening bilateral relations, as the US has criticized China for "taking advantage of the US".  

The disagreement "is not just about the air flight market ... it is a new brawl in the China-US trade dispute," Lin Zhijie, a veteran aviation market watcher, told the Global Times Sunday. 

Song Guoyou, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, said the US posturing showed that Washington can find fault with China on any issue as bilateral relations are fraught. 

As the two countries' disagreements were renewed amid the coronavirus pandemic, there have been ups and downs in China-US aviation relations. The Trump administration threatened in early June to block all Chinese airlines from flying to the US, in response to China's curbs on US airlines out of pandemic concerns. The two countries later agreed to each allow four weekly flights. 

Many Chinese experts have criticized the US' obsession with so-called parity in the aviation sector, saying that Washington should take specific conditions into account such as development of the coronavirus and market demand. 

Chinese news portal guancha.cn Saturday cited a civil aviation commentator as saying that the US is deliberately creating the illusion that China is making an issue with the US in order to divert focus away from the US' intensifying internal chaos.

Gao Lingyun, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that US is pushing China to allow more US flights to save its coronavirus-hit aviation industry, but it is irresponsible to raise such requirements without taking the pandemic into consideration,

"If US asks for parity in China-US flights, it should also make sure that the two countries have the same level of coronavirus fighting strength and results," Gao told the Global Times. 

He also said that the frequency of flights would be decided by market demand instead of top-down arrangements.

Lin said it's likely that the China-US airline brawl will be a relatively long process, as the two sides are split over core interests.  

"The US wants China to drop any air travel restrictions so that its airlines can make money, but China wants to guard against imported coronavirus cases. It will gradually open up the aviation market under this premise," he said.

Experts also stressed that the US move to extend so-called parity requirements into economic sectors would make the two countries drift apart from each other.

"If the US equates the pursuit of so-called extreme parity with a fight for US interests, it would make business operation increasingly difficult between the two countries, and their interaction will be forced to wane gradually," said Song.