U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS
How to Start A Cold War
FromFar Eastern Economic Review
"The collision of a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese
fighter didn't have to end this way. The handling of
the crisis by Beijing and Washington reveals flawed
leadership and the ingredients of a cold war'
By Susan V. Lawrence with David Murphy/BEIJING, Murray
Hiebert/WASHINGTON and Nayan Chanda/HONG KONG
Issue cover-dated April 12, 2001
IT WAS THE ACCIDENT that American and
Chinese officials have always feared would happen. On
April 1, after years of close calls between American
and Chinese military craft prowling the waters and skies
of Asia, a United States Navy EP-3 signals-surveillance
aircraft collided with a Chinese F-8 fighter jet that was
tracking it.
The Chinese jet crashed and its pilot remains missing.
The U.S. aircraft suffered sufficient damage to force an
emergency landing on a military airbase on China's
Hainan island. The crew and aircraft remain in Chinese
hands. Chinese analysts warn that getting them home
will take time.
U.S.-China relations are taking on Cold War
overtones. The collision and the resulting stand-off over
the fate of the U.S. crew and aircraft come in the wake
of a senior Chinese military officer's December
defection to the U.S., and China's detention of a
Chinese citizen and U.S. permanent resident, Gao
Zhan, on espionage charges. Her formal arrest came on
April 3. If China continues to make an incident of the
mid-air collision, as it shows all the signs of doing,
"April 1 could become the first day of a U.S.-China
cold war," warns David Shambaugh, a China specialist
at George Washington University and the Brookings
Institution in Washington.
The saga over the U.S. surveillance aircraft plays into
an already heated debate in Washington over how the
new Bush administration should view China--as a rival,
an enemy, or something else again. Hitherto uncertain
bilateral relations got a boost from the surprisingly
cordial reception that President George W. Bush and
his team accorded China's most senior foreign policy
official, Qian Qichen, on his March visit to Washington.
But this crisis is fast undoing that progress.
The affair, many experts say, is having an immediate
impact on the U.S. debate over what arms sales the
United States should approve for Taiwan during the
annual arms-sales review in late April. China's handling
of the collision so far, Shambaugh says, "will strengthen
the voice of those who want to sell a more robust
package" of arms to Taiwan.
That's bad news for Beijing, where the crisis is already
posing a serious challenge for the leadership. For
domestic political reasons, President Jiang Zemin and
his colleagues cannot appear too soft toward the U.S.,
particularly when a Chinese pilot remains missing. Jiang
worries not just about street protests. He also must
worry about his support within the Communist Party
and the military in the run-up to a key party congress
next year, at which he will give up his civilian and party
posts but may hope to retain his chairmanship of
China's Central Military Commission.
Neither, though, can Jiang afford to see a major rupture
in relations with Washington, particularly if the result is a
U.S. policy toward Taiwan that seriously undermines
China's interests. China's bid to host the 2008
Olympics argues against such a confrontation, too.
In the early hours after the mid-air collision, a quiet
resolution of the crisis still looked possible. China
waited nearly 13 hours to make its first public comment
on the incident, and then it was a measured late-night
statement from China's Foreign Ministry spokesman.
Beijing did not dispute that the accident happened
outside Chinese airspace, though it did maintain that the
U.S. aircraft was at fault, and that following the
accident, the plane "intruded" into China's airspace and
landed in Hainan without China's permission.
Subsequent Chinese television news programmes ran
the spokesman's statement low in the broadcast. The
April 2 edition of the Liberation Army daily ran it on
page four. Apparently hoping to keep the incident
low-key, the governments of both countries seemed to
have made a decision to keep their top leaders out of
the fray.
That approach went over badly in China's Internet chat
rooms, which officials monitor closely for a sense of
popular reaction to their policies. On April 2, messages
on the People's Daily's bulletin board included
eyebrow-raising calls for a military strongman to carry
out a coup, or at least to kidnap Jiang and force him to
stand up to American aggression, as the warlord Zhang
Xueliang kidnapped nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek
to force him to stand up to Japan during World War II.
When by midnight on April 2, Beijing time, China had
still had not granted U.S. diplomats access to the
American crew on Hainan island, Bush broke his
silence to say what the U.S. priorities were: "The
prompt and safe return of the crew and the return of the
aircraft without further damaging or tampering."
Positions were already beginning to harden.
Among Asia specialists in the U.S., the decision to have
Bush comment remains controversial. "Because of
domestic pressure, Bush cannot keep quiet while the
Chinese are holding our plane and the crew," says
Robert Manning of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Manning thinks a lower-ranking official, such as
Secretary of State Colin Powell, should have taken the
podium.
On April 3, Chinese papers carried a report on
Assistant Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong's meeting
with U.S. Ambassador to China Joseph Prueher two
days earlier. Now the U.S. aircraft's entering of
Chinese airspace and landing in Hainan after the
collision had become "gross violations of China's
national sovereignty."
Then, apparently responding to Bush's intervention,
Jiang weighed in, further raising the stakes. He
demanded, as the Foreign Ministry officials had, that
the U.S. take responsibility for the collision. He also
presented a new demand: that the U.S. cease
reconnaissance flights "in the airspace off China's
coastal areas."
In press conferences that afternoon and evening, the
Foreign Ministry spokesman outlined a raft of Chinese
grievances and made a series of demands of the U.S.,
including an apology, an end to surveillance flights near
China and "an explanation to the Chinese government
and people on the U.S. plane's actions." He also
indicated that China felt it had full rights to inspect the
aircraft, despite U.S. claims that the EP-3, packed with
sensitive intelligence-gathering gear, should be seen as
sovereign U.S. territory. He gave no indication of when
the crew or aircraft might be allowed to return home.
By April 4, Beijing had given the go-ahead for a
domestic propaganda campaign designed to stir exactly
those popular emotions that the government had tried
for the previous three days to keep in check. The
popular Beijing Youth Daily ran on its front page the
headline, "Evidence of High-Handedness," over a
photograph of the U.S. aircraft. Like other papers, it
also carried a report on the outrage of the Chinese
people. The story's headline: "The American plane is
beyond belief: Beijingers censure the U.S.'s
high-handed acts."
Setting the tone for the kind of popular reaction the
government now hoped to see, that story quoted a
Peking University student who said all her classmates
were in agreement: "America violated China's airspace
and sovereignty. This is an expression of their
hegemonic behaviour. We support the Chinese
government's serious and principled stand." For
Americans in Beijing, the campaign uncomfortably
recalls the government's stoking of anti-Nato
demonstrations in 1999, following the U.S. bombing of
China's embassy in Belgrade. Street demonstrations
then resulted in serious damage to U.S. diplomatic
properties in several Chinese cities.
How did the crisis escalate so quickly? An early and
major irritant has been China's slow reaction to U.S.
requests for access to the aircrew, for meetings with
Chinese officials, and for reassurances about the fate of
the crew and aircraft. American diplomats finally met
the crew on the evening of April 3, some 60 hours after
the incident. Any further delay would have been a
violation of a bilateral consular agreement.
A senior research fellow at the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, who asked not to be named, suggests
that China's handling of the situation "perhaps reveals
again the problems in the crisis-management system
here," referring to China's consensus-driven
decision-making process. Jiang, unlike his predecessor
as China's top leader, Deng Xiaoping, does not have
the clout to make decisions on sensitive issues on his
own. He must convene an array of officials, who must
reach consensus on the proposed course of action.
Particularly in the aftermath of the embassy bombing in
1999, "many people complain that the system is not
very good at dealing with crises," says the scholar.
"There are a lot of demands to organize our own
National Security Council." Senior Chinese officials
have told visitors, however, that a Chinese NSC is
likely still at least two years away.
Responds Jia Qingguo, associate dean of the School of
International Studies at Peking University, "In any sort
of accident, you need to conduct an investigation and
that takes time."
Another major irritant has been China's refusal to
honour U.S. requests that the EP-3's hi-tech contents
not be tampered with. "First they try to collect
intelligence on China, not the other way around," says
Yan Xuetong, a security expert at Tsinghua University,
says of the crew of the aircraft. "Second, they land on
Chinese territory without Chinese permission, and third,
they knock down a Chinese plane and a Chinese pilot
is lost." Says Yan, "The U.S. doesn't have the right or
the legitimacy to ask" that China not inspect the aircraft.
The U.S. now appears to accept that inspections have
happened. "We have every reason to think the Chinese
have been all over the airplane," Prueher said on ABC
television's Good Morning America.
The priority for the U.S. now: getting the 24-member
crew back to the U.S. Bush drove that point home on
April 3: "This accident has the potential of undermining
our hopes for a fruitful and productive relationship
between our two countries," he said in Washington. "To
keep that from happening, our servicemen and women
need to come home."
Chinese scholars suggest, however, that this may still
take some time. "Our leaders must consider public
opinion," says Chu Shulong, a expert in U.S.-China
relations at the Chinese Institute of Contemporary
International Relations, a think-tank affiliated with
China's Ministry of State Security. "It is not good to
resolve this without resolution on the [Chinese] pilot."
Says Peking University's Jia: "China could let [the crew]
and the plane go, but if they did, they would be
answering to U.S. citizens and not to Chinese citizens."
The return of the aircraft will likely take even longer: It
will need to be repaired, Yan notes. He also predicts a
"long negotiation" over American compensation for the
lost Chinese fighter and pilot--even though the U.S.
strongly disputes that the EP-3 was responsible for the
accident.
Robert Ross, a China expert at Boston College, is
hopeful that relations can return to some sort of
normalcy with the repatriation of the crew. "Ideally,
simply allowing the American pilots and crew to return
to the U.S. would defuse much of the tension over the
issue, and allow the experts to deal with the recovery of
the aircraft," Ross says. Jiang, at least, apparently
believes the situation is under control. He left China on
April 5 for a 12-day visit to Latin America. Handling
the situation from here on could be a key test for his
heir apparent, Hu Jintao.
Nonetheless, the longer the affair drags on and mutual
recriminations fly, the greater the likely long-term
negative impact on mutual perceptions. In the U.S., the
story of China's holding of the American surveillance
aircraft and its crew is already dominating even morning
TV talk shows. Communities with links to members of
the crew are tying yellow ribbons around trees--as
Americans did in 1979 during the Iran hostage crisis.
"People are perplexed. They don't understand why
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