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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (63433)	12/29/2002 11:58:23 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Is it possible that North Korea and China are working together on the nuclear confrontation? Remember the China downed US plane incident in April 2001?? time.com Downed Spy Plane Takes Sino-U.S. Relations To New Level Cell Phone from Beijing: TIME’s Matt Forney says the incident adds to the tension between the two countries in recent weeks BY NICK PAPADOPOULOS Monday, April. 2, 2001 The collision of a U.S. spy plane with one of two Chinese jet fighter planes on Sunday has further heightened tensions between the two countries. The Chinese pilot is said to be missing after his plane crashed into the South China Sea, and the fate of 24 U.S. crew members is unknown, after their emergency landing on Hainan Island on China’s south coast. In a mayday call, the crew reported they were O.K, but they have not been heard of since. Meanwhile, both China and the U.S. are blaming each other for the accident. TIME’s Beijing bureau chief Matt Forney explains: Relations between China and the U.S have been quite turbulent in recent times. A number of Chinese-born, U.S.-based scholars have been detained in Beijing, and U.S. President George W. Bush recently described China as a ‘competitor’ rather than a ‘strategic partner.’ What further impact will this incident have on U.S.-Sino relations? A lot of what’s been happening lately really sounds like Cold War stuff. We’ve got the U.S. expelling Russian spies, we’ve got China detaining academics on suspicion of espionage, we’ve got a U.S. surveillance plane flying over China, and China shadowing them, a mishap in their air, an emergency landing, perhaps crews held in custody and even interrogated ... This is a new development in U.S.-Sino relations, in that it seems much of the dialogue that the two sides had tried to set up over the past few years has failed to alleviate the kinds of problems the talks were designed to address. The U.S. has spent a great deal of energy engaging the People’s Liberation Army to decrease tensions, increase transparency, and avoid just this type of mishap. Now there’s a question of whether all that energy was well placed. Is Beijing still maintaining that the U.S. pilot caused the collision by veering into the path of its planes? Will we ever get to the bottom of who was responsible? My understanding of international agreements and air protocol is that the responsibility of avoiding a collision during shadowing exercises is on the more agile plane. The U.S. and the former Soviet Union for decades trailed each other and played these top-gun games in the air. In all those years they never had an incident like this, in part because they observed protocols and in part because their pilots were very good. On that point, earlier today Admiral Dennis C. Blair, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, told a press conference that the Navy had recently complained about Chinese pilots acting ‘less professional’ and ‘more aggressive’ during these intercepts? That’s right. China’s pilots are poorly trained, and it seems they are not as aware of the protocols. So that’s one explanation for how this event could have happened and why China would be culpable for it. We don’t know where the collision took place. It is entirely possible that the U.S. plane violated what is internationally recognized as Chinese airspace. There is also a question of what China airspace is, because China claims ocean territory all the way to the shores of Malaysia and Indonesia (because it claims ownership of some island groups) as airspace. This would explain why they are saying it occurred in Chinese airspace. But there is another piece in the puzzle here. China’s Foreign Ministry says its airspace was violated when the U.S. plane landed on Hainan Island, a Chinese province, without permission, which leaves room for the following explanation: that contact took place in international waters and that the U.S. plane then violated Chinese airspace during its emergency landing. China seems to have left itself that wriggle room at least in its public statements. However China’s media are quite unambiguous: a U.S. plane knocked down a Chinese plane over Chinese airspace. Do you know the fate or condition of the 24 U.S. crew members? There has been no contact with them since their mayday call. Does the U.S have anything to worry about? Nobody knows where they are. It is widely suspected, though, that the crew destroyed as much of the equipment on the plane during the landing as they could. Apparently their last radio contact with their base in Okinawa was after they landed, when they reported that they were O.K. But they have not made any contact with their home base since then. The U.S. plane was said to be carrying classified equipment. I guess the U.S Navy must be worried that the plane is now sitting on an airstrip in China. Very Worried. My understanding is that it’s not just the equipment that the U.S. has on board that China is curious about -- and would love to reverse engineer, if Chinese technicians had a chance to do so -- but they are also very interested in what sort of intelligence the U.S. was able to gather with this plane. The EP-3 is a signals intelligence aircraft that can monitor electronic pulses and can read things like phone lines and other electronic communications. And China I’m sure would relish the chance to figure out exactly what sort of information is most vulnerable to U.S spying. President Bush has to make an important decision later this month involving Taiwan. Could this incident affect his decision in any way? Bush has to decide what sort of package of weapons to sell Taiwan. And what China objects to most strenuously is Taipei’s request for an Aegis defense system. So if this incident causes a ruckus in Washington and strengthens or amplifies the voices of people who support a very robust weapons sale to Taiwan, well then that could influence the Bush administration and for domestic policy reasons encourage it to go ahead with the Aegis sale. And China, you’ll recall, has repeatedly warned that it might use force if the sale does goes ahead.