NEW YORK, April 8 – The Bush team ignored Secretary of State
Colin Powell’s advice to express “regret” early on in the standoff with China over the spy plane incident and tapped old family sources instead, Newsweek reports in the April 16 issue.
In a phone call last Tuesday with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Powell had raised the idea of formally
expressing “regret” for the incident, but his suggestion got nowhere.
By Wednesday, dissatisfied with the advice his team was giving him, President George W. Bush began reaching out to his father’s old friends instead, report Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas and Beijing Bureau Chief Melinda Liu in a special report on the standoff (on newsstands Monday, April 9).
An informed source says the White House made calls to former President Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, his secretary of state, James A. Baker, and also consulted with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who launched the first opening to China in the 1970s. Bush may not have made the calls directly, preferring to use go-betweens, but one top aide
says that Bush has at times picked up the phone himself. Newsweek reports that the president almost certainly spoke to his father, an old China hand, but at his explicit direction, White House aides refused to touch the subject.
It was not until the next day that Powell made an official statement of “regret” and Powell’s top aide and close friend, Richard Armitage, began
talking to Chinese officials about a letter that might unlock the impasse.
That afternoon, Newsweek reports, Armitage delivered a secret letter to the
Chinese, exploring ways to back down from the crisis, including reviving an
obscure U.S.-China commission, established two years ago to look into ways to
minimize tensions and avoid maritime accidents, to investigate the incident.
And according to a high Administration official, the Bushites are also using
private back channels to communicate with Beijing.
Thomas and Liu report that when President Bush learned of the incident
last Saturday evening, he was at Camp David hosting a dinner with the First
Lady. Neither he nor Rice, also present, seemed anxious about the situation
deteriorating into a hostage crisis, says a source who was present. While
there was some talk of using the White House “hotline” to call Beijing
directly, Bush and his aides felt such a call would be premature.
In Beijing, officials worried that anti-American sentiment would get out
of hand and extra police were sent out to quash minor protest efforts. On the
Chinese Internet, government Web masters keep a tight lid on any Web chat that
might provoke angry demonstrations. In one chat room, a posting falsely
declaring that 100,000 students from 10 universities were marching on the
American Embassy kept popping up — and kept getting deleted by vigilant Web
masters.
As Lui reports from Beijing on the internal political struggle in China,
the incident has forced President Jiang Zemin to talk tough and prevent the
hard-liners from hijacking policy. His long-range objectives for the year
remain bonding with Bush’s new administration, thwarting advanced U.S. arms
sales to Taiwan, joining the World Trade Organization, and bidding to host the
Olympic Games in 2008. Liu writes that Jiang didn’t want to alienate the West
irreversibly or allow tensions to get out of hand, so he and other moderates
tried to contain or suppress public protests against America.
At the outset of the incident, both sides “forcefully asserted their
interests using muscular language,” writes Newsweek International Editor
Fareed Zakaria in his weekly column, and “for a moment it seemed as if we were
back in the Cold War.” While we are not, he adds, and China is not the Soviet
Union, China is a third world country, and the danger it poses to the United
States is “not one of its booming strength, but rather of weakness of the
country and of its regime” and that won’t make it any easier in trying to
maintain peace in East Asia.
Two years ago a pro-Beijing Hong Kong daily interviewed Chinese pilots who
had begun “buzzing” American surveillance planes as they flew over the China
Sea. The paper gushed that the way in which the pilots hassled the U.S. planes
demonstrated “consummate flying skills and the wisdom of being bold but
cautious.” Whether or not that odd, almost oxymoronic, phrase can be applied
to the Chinese pilot who collided with the U.S. Navy EP-3E last week, it
accurately sums up the way that both sides have dealt with each other in the
days that followed — bold but cautious. At the start, Beijing and Washington
quickly and forcefully asserted their interests in muscular language. But once
they recognized that the situation could get out of hand, both sides began
climbing down from their rhetorical ledges. The Americans, having at first
refused to apologize in any form, soon became willing to express “regret.” The
Chinese began by demanding a formal apology, but two days later President
Jiang Zemin explained that what he wanted was more akin to a simple “excuse
me.” Those shifts, plus a few more diplomatic bells and whistles, have eased
tensions. But those first few days of the crisis had a strangely familiar air.
There was a sense that events could spiral out of control; that both sides
desperately feared losing face; that diplomats would have to parse phrases and
evoke obscure treaties. For a moment it seemed as if we were back in the cold
war.
Of course we are not and China is not the old Soviet Union. It has neither
the material capacity nor the ideological appeal to be a global rival to
America. To state the obvious but often obscured fact: China is a Third World
country. It has a per capita GDP of about $3,800 — well below Mexico’s — and
spends less than 15 percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget on its armed
forces. Nor does the Middle Kingdom have the ideological appeal of the old
Soviet Union. Nowhere on the planet is China the model for the future — not
even in China, which is busily becoming a quasi-capitalist society.
The danger China poses to the United States is not one of booming strength
but rather of weakness — both of the country and of its regime.
Unfortunately, that’s not going to make it any easier to maintain peace in
East Asia.
China is going through a massive, painful transition from an agrarian to
an industrial society (and from the lunacy of Maoism to the market). In recent
years this has produced huge social stresses and strains as state-owned
enterprises collapse in the northern rust belt, law and order unravels in the
countryside and corruption accompanies primitive capitalism in the cities.
More troublesome for Beijing is the slow erosion of the ideology that gave
it legitimacy. The regime has filled the vacuum left by Marxism in part by
competent management. Chinese living standards have risen continuously for the
last quarter century and most Chinese credit their government for this
remarkable change. But equally, the regime has cultivated the image of being
the fierce protector of China’s sovereignty. This sort of nationalism rarely
exists in the abstract and in China it has come to mean one thing more than
any other — standing up to the United States. Thus we see that with the
Communist Party in the midst of a leadership succession, none of its potential
leaders wants to look soft. This is a problem that will not pass. The regime’s
vulnerability has made it encourage, or at least embrace ugly, anti-American
forces it may not be able to control.
Economics and ideology aside, even in military terms China is fearful of
its weakness. Ever since the gulf war — and then the Kosovo campaign —
Beijing has been worried that it’s old, rusting armed forces and a strategy
that relied on quantity not quality (in men and arms) were no match for
America’s laser-guided weapons and stealth warfare. Even worse, they might not
even be a match for Taiwan’s high-tech forces. Over the last few years the
politics of the region have, from Beijing’s standpoint, gotten worse. Taiwan
has grown bolder in its dealings with the mainland and the United States seems
more willing to come to the island’s assistance. So China has begun a major
military modernization and is studying low-tech methods of battling a
high-tech army — what military planners call “asymmetric warfare.” American
planes hovering above, hugging the Chinese coast, always there to watch,
listen and learn must represent a constant reminder of America’s overwhelming
superiority.
So do these weaknesses suggest that China is really not a threat? No. It
suggests that China is really not stable. It is being run by an aging regime
that is trying simultaneously to modernize its vast country, gain influence in
the world and preserve its own power. Besides, weak powers have often proved
just as troublesome as strong ones. In an important essay in the spring issue
of International Security, MIT’s Thomas Christensen points out that Japan
attacked Pearl Harbor fully aware that it was going up against a much stronger
adversary and was starting a war it knew it would probably lose. China itself
entered the Korean War, hoping that a quick strike at an advantageous moment
would make up for the fact that American forces were superior to its own.
Christensen’s extensive interviews with Chinese strategists and analysts
suggest that many in Beijing believe a confrontation with America over Taiwan
is inevitable — even though these analysts recognize that China may not win
that war. For them, the costs of inaction appear greater than the risks of
action.
The greatest problem for America over the next few years is that the
communist regime in Beijing will look around and see growing social unrest,
the rise of a middle class, the Internet and satellite television, Falun Gong,
America’s relentless technological edge, Taiwan’s growing assertiveness and
conclude that it has to do something because time is not on its side. The fact
that it is right is precisely what makes the situation so dangerous.
The Dogfight: It Started in the Skies, and Quickly Spread to Competing Capitals; Behind a Tense Standoff
Aside from pilots’ wings, the two men had as little in common as their two
countries. Lt. Shane Osborn of Norfolk, Neb., flew a slow, propeller-driven
EP-3E, a kind of lumbering airborne tape recorder designed to suck up
electronic signals — radio and radar transmissions, missile telemetry, phone
calls — that might one day help the United States fight a war against China.
Wang Wei, 33, was a fighter pilot, a Chinese “top gun” whose F-8 jet scrambled
to intercept intruders — usually American spy planes like the EP-3E flown by
Osborn. Flying spy planes is boring, unglamorous work, interspersed with
moments of danger (of the 200 American airmen killed during the cold war, most
were on reconnaissance missions). The pilots of spy planes are often lowly
lieutenants like Osborn, who is 26 years old. Their main duty is to stay on
course for hours on end. To break the tedium, the crews of American spy planes
sometimes clown around. When Chinese fighters intercepted an EP-3E in the
winter of 1999, the American crewmen were decked out in Santa Claus hats. They
flashed “OK” signs at the Chinese pilots, as well as cruder gestures.
Not funny, according to the Chinese. “In the West, the Santa Claus hat is
a happy symbol,” wrote a Chinese military magazine in a recent article
describing the incident, “but it seems arrogant for pilots wearing such hats
to hover near another country’s airspace.” The pilot who flew up to confront
the spying American Santas that day was Wang Wei. The article described how
Wang and his wingman used “combat actions” to “force away” the American plane.
In China, the veteran Wang, 33, was seen as a heroic defender of the
motherland. In truth, he could be a bit of a joker himself. An American
air crew once photographed Wang winging by holding up a sign advertising his
e-mail address. A showboat in the fighter-jock tradition, Wang Wei liked to
fly underneath the ponderous American EP-3Es — then suddenly pop up just
ahead. The maneuver, first perfected by Soviet pilots during the cold war, is
called “thumping,” because it rocks the slower plane in the jet’s wake and
jolts its crew. Wang thumped hard. He once reportedly left scorch marks from
his afterburner on the windshield of an American spy plane.
When Wang Wei flew out to intercept Lieutenant Osborn’s EP-3E on the
morning of Sunday, April 1, as the American reconnaissance plane neared the
headquarters of China’s South Sea Fleet in the port of Zhanjiang, the two
pilots — and their two nations — collided. Exactly what happened is the
subject of a dispute that could badly strain the already rocky relations
between the world’s sole superpower and the Asian giant. Wang’s wingman, Zhao
Yu, later claimed that the American pilot sharply banked his plane to the
left, striking the tail of Wang’s fighter. In the version put out last week by
the Pentagon, the EP-3E pilot was flying straight and true when Wang played
his favorite trick. As it flew beneath the EP-3E, the Chinese jet disrupted
the airflow across the wing of the American plane, causing it to dip and clip
Wang’s tail. The Chinese fighter spun out of control and crashed. Though there
were reports that Wang bailed out, he was apparently lost at sea. Missing its
nose cone, with two of its propellers damaged, the EP-3E plunged 8,000 feet
before Lieutenant Osborn was able to regain control. As his crew, wielding
pickaxes, desperately tried to destroy the EP-3E’s highly sensitive
surveillance equipment and software, Osborn flew his wounded plane to the
nearest airfield — which happened to be Wang’s air base on Hainan Island,
just off the China coast. Osborn made a hairy, high-speed landing, without
trying to use his damaged flaps. The plane and its crew were immediately
surrounded by Chinese soldiers wielding guns.
It seems likely that the 21 men and three women aboard the EP-3E will
sooner or later be allowed to come home. But if the plane is returned it will
be minus some of its high-tech gear. The negotiations were marked all the way
by haggling over face-saving details. At the outset of the crisis last week,
the posturing between China and the United States mirrored the midair crash
between Osborn and Wang: an unnerving display of bravado, misunderstanding and
dangerous miscalculation. The attitudes displayed by the leaders of the two
nations were worlds apart. President George W. Bush at first tried to show an
unruffled coolness in his first test as commander in chief, but succeeded
largely in demonstrating ignorance of his adversary. The Beijing regime
exhibited massive and easily wounded pride. Its public face was angry and
resolute — but in truth the Chinese may have been just confused and divided.
A reconstruction of the opening days of the crisis suggests that each side
needs to learn much from the other — or risky gamesmanship in the skies and
in the distant capitals could spell more trouble down the road for a complex
relationship.
During the presidential campaign, and in his early foreign-policy
pronouncements, George W. Bush made clear that he would be more of a cold-eyed
“realist” and less of a meddling do-gooder than former President Clinton. In
the case of China, at least, Bush may have overcorrected. He seems not so much
detached as indifferent. Among his main foreign-policy advisers there are no
old China hands. The middle and lower ranks, as yet only partially filled,
include no notable Sinologists. “They don’t want panda-huggers,” said one
Republican China expert. Bush has tried to learn from his father’s experience,
and George H.W.’s experience in China was mostly unfortunate. He was roundly
criticized for trying to defend Chinese leaders after the 1989 Tiananmen
Square massacre.
Rather than pursue Clinton’s goal of “strategic partnership” with the
Chinese, Bush announced that he would treat China as a “strategic competitor.”
Aside from some vague cold-war echoes, it isn’t quite clear what that means —
possibly, not even to Bush himself. Bush didn’t seem to be trying all that
hard to strengthen or explore relations with Beijing in his first days in
office. While he called numerous world leaders from nations large and small,
he did not place a call to Chinese President Jiang Zemin. To the Chinese, ever
conscious of face, Bush’s unconcern amounted to a rebuff. It did not go
unnoticed in Beijing that President Bush went to great lengths to orchestrate
a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Yushio Mori, even though Mori was about to
resign.
Bush seemed relatively unfazed when he first learned that 24 U.S. airmen
and their damaged spy plane were in Chinese custody at about 9:15 on Saturday
night, March 31 (Washington is 12 hours behind Beijing). The president and
First Lady were entertaining Bush’s old Yale buddy Roland Betts and his wife
for the weekend at Camp David. National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice was
also a guest that night. Rice put out a few calls to rouse the
national-security bureaucracy, but according to a source who was present at
Camp David, neither Bush nor Rice seemed anxious about the situation’s
deteriorating into a hostage crisis. There was some discussion of using the
White House “hot line” initiated by Bill Clinton to call Beijing directly, but
Bush and his aides thought such a call would be premature. Bush went to bed
around his usual time, before midnight. White House aides reassured reporters
that the incident would be treated as an accident and resolved within 24 hours or so.
The American assumption was wrong. In China, as news of the collision
spread, the regime feared an outburst of anti-American hysteria. In an attempt
to distract attention from the failings of communist ideology, Beijing’s
leaders have fomented fierce nationalism in recent years. When an American
warplane mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo
war two years ago, the Chinese government bused in demonstrators to stone the
American Embassy. But the rioting got out of control, a scary sight to rulers
who remember the Democracy movement they crushed at Tiananmen Square. Now,
with growing resentment of America’s latest “barbarous outrage,” Beijing
worried that the mob might again get the upper hand. In Beijing, extra police
personnel quashed minor protest efforts. On the Chinese Internet, government
Web masters kept a tight lid on any Web chat that might provoke angry
demonstrations. In one chat room, a posting falsely declaring that
100,000 students from 10 universities were marching on the American Embassy
kept popping up — and kept getting deleted by vigilant Web masters. Still,
Chinese cyberspace dripped with anti-American vitriol: “We should kill some
U.S. soldiers to teach the invaders a lesson,” opined one chatter. Said
another: “Are you ready? This is war.”
Some Chinese leaders, especially those in the People’s Liberation Army,
were eager to fan the flames. Recently cut off from some of its sources of
corruption, like an active trade in pirated video discs, the PLA needs new
sources of revenue. A military crisis with the West might help boost their
budgets and prestige. For the military hard-liners, the midair collision with
an American spy plane and loss of a brave Chinese pilot was a chance to cry
“Remember Belgrade!” Chinese sometimes xenophobic press added fuel with photos
of the banged-up EP-3E and the headline proof of bullying. Other Chinese
leaders feared that they would be blamed if the Americans got away with spying
on the Chinese and the crew of the EP-3E was too quickly released.
Divided, further riled by the demands of the commander of the U.S. Pacific
Fleet, Adm. Dennis Blair, that the Chinese not set foot in the grounded
airplane, Beijing’s leadership essentially went silent.
American officials had trouble rousing any response from the Chinese on
the first Sunday after the accident. In Beijing, Ambassador Joseph W. Prueher
had trouble reaching someone of authority. An old fighter pilot, retired Navy
Admiral Prueher is no Sinologist, though he does have some experience getting
nowhere with Chinese officials. When the Chinese rattled their sabers by
firing missiles toward Taiwan in 1996, Admiral Prueher, then commander of U.S.
forces in the Pacific, complained, “I don’t know anybody in China to talk to.”
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell wasn’t having much better luck.
He tried to reach Qian Qichen, the deputy minister who handles foreign policy.
But the Beijing official would not come to the phone. On Hainan, the crew was
held incommunicado, and U.S. satellite photos showed the Chinese removing
equipment from the airplane as it sat on the runway.
Still, in the White House, it was mostly business as usual. Bush came back
from Camp David early on Sunday, not because of the crisis, but because bad
weather interfered with his outdoor recreation. On Monday, White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer kept a long-scheduled day off to attend the
Yankees’ home opener. “We cannot let this escalate,” Bush told his advisers,
as he groped for some way to get Beijing’s attention. Bush finally made his
first public statement on the incident, but he seemed more irked and puzzled
than either firm or conciliatory. The president said that he was “troubled” by
the Chinese government’s inaction. He demanded American access to the crew and
the return of the plane “without any further tampering.”
That night, an American military man, Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock, was
permitted to see the crew of the EP-3E — but only for 40 minutes, and not
alone. By this time, White House aides say, Bush had begun to worry about “our
people,” as he called the airmen and cryptologists detained on Hainan, and
about the reaction of their families back home. The president insisted on
speaking personally to Sealock to get a rundown on the crew’s well-being. He
was also hearing the angry rumblings from anti-communist hard-liners on
Capitol Hill who were beginning to grumble about “hostages” and demanding
action. What action wasn’t quite clear, but there are plenty of opportunities
ahead to tweak or punish Beijing. The administration is supposed to decide in
a few weeks whether to grant Taiwan’s request to buy a small arsenal of new
weaponry, including Aegis antimissile defenses. Beijing is trying to finalize
its entry into the World Trade Organization and badly wants to sponsor the
2008 Summer Olympics. On Tuesday afternoon, the president stepped into the
Rose Garden and tried to ratchet up some pressure on Beijing. “We have allowed
the Chinese government time to do the right thing,” he said, squinting a bit
and looking stern. “But now it is time for our servicemen and women to come
home.”
The administration seemed to be treating the episode as the sort of
espionage flap that occurred from time to time during the cold war. With the
Kremlin, it was simply understood: we spy on them, they spy on us. If someone
got caught, there were ritual protests, a few diplomat/spies would be booted
out, and it was back to business as usual. But it seems to have only slowly
dawned on the Bush administration that these are different times, and that the
Chinese see things differently. Still smarting over colonialist bullying after
several millenniums as “the Middle Kingdom,” the center of the universe, the
Chinese deeply resent any intrusion on their borders. Indeed, many Chinese
claim that the collision did not occur over international waters — 80 miles
from the Chinese coastline — but rather in their “territory,” which they
define as anywhere up to 200 miles from their coasts.
If the administration had any doubts about China’s resentment and
balkiness, it lost them when Chinese President Jiang Zemin was finally heard
from on Tuesday night. Beijing’s top man insisted the United States must “bear
full responsibility” for the collision. He demanded an apology and called on
Bush to halt all spy flights off the Chinese coast.
The Chinese president’s statement was a wake-up call. Bush’s team finally
turned to the issue that should have commanded its attention from the first:
how to allow the Chinese to save face, without appearing to openly kowtow. In
a phone call with Condi Rice on Tuesday morning, Secretary of State Powell had
actually raised the idea of formally expressing “regret” for the incident, but
his suggestion had gone nowhere. Later on Tuesday, while flying back from a
meeting in Florida, Powell himself had said to reporters, “I regret” the death
of the Chinese pilot, but his remark had been treated like an aside, a
throwaway, and no one paid much attention. Besides, the secretary seemed to be
speaking for himself, not the president. And Powell that same day had declared
that the United States “has nothing to apologize for.”
It was becoming apparent to Bush that low-key finger-wagging was not going
to bring home Lieutenant Osborn and his crewmates. Though the president had
done his best to seem nonchalant and cheerful in public, teasing reporters and
making self-deprecating jokes in his usual way, he was said to be tetchy in
private and he was beginning to complain about losing sleep. Though Bush never
goes to bed late if he can help it, his phone calls with Rice started at
5:30 a.m. Dissatisfied with the advice he was getting from his own team, he
began reaching out to his father’s old friends. Bush may not make the calls
directly, preferring to use go-betweens. But one top aide says that Bush has
at times picked up the phone himself. According to an informed source, the
White House began calling George H.W. Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent
Scowcroft, and his secretary of State, James A. Baker. This source says the
White House also consulted with Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s former secretary of
State who launched the first opening to China in the 1970s and now advises
major corporations that do business in China. It is almost certain that Bush
talked to another old China hand — his father — but at the president’s
explicit direction White House aides refused to touch the subject.
Finally, the diplomatic wheels began to turn. On Wednesday morning, at his
8:15 a.m. meeting with top advisers, President Bush looked around and asked,
“Is there a way out?” He meant for the Chinese, but it was clearly time to
start showing some contrition. Within a couple of hours, Powell appeared
before reporters and explicitly stated, “We regret that the Chinese plane did
not get down safely, and we regret the loss of life of the Chinese pilot.”
Just as important, Powell’s top aide and close friend, Richard Armitage, had
begun talking to Chinese officials about a letter that might unlock the
impasse. A former Navy SEAL and Vietnam combat vet, the burly Armitage comes
across as a tough guy, but he is also an experienced negotiator and fixer.
That afternoon, Armitage delivered a secret letter to the Chinese, exploring
ways to back down from the crisis. Among them: reviving an obscure and largely
moribund U.S.-China commission, established two years ago to look into ways to
minimize tensions and avoid maritime accidents, to investigate the incident.
Powell was clearly taking the lead in trying to resolve the crisis. Donald
Rumsfeld, Bush’s hawkish secretary of Defense, stayed largely mum, in part to
avoid provoking China’s edgy military into a bellicose response. At
10:15 p.m., Powell called Bush to brief him on the diplomatic moves, and at
2:30 a.m. Powell was awakened to handle developments in China, where it was
mid-afternoon, Thursday. Then on Thursday afternoon Washington time, the
president added his own voice: in a speech to newspaper editors, he voiced his
own “regret” over the loss of the Chinese pilot and sent his “prayers” to the
downed pilot’s family. (A White House spokesman said that Bush’s remark was
not planned in advance.)
According to a high administration official, the Bush team is also using
private back channels to communicate with the Chinese leadership. A diplomatic
source said Kissinger told a Chinese official on Thursday that his personal
opinion was China should release the crew members no later than the weekend or
risk turning American public opinion against Beijing.
By Thursday night the logjam was beginning to break. General Sealock was
permitted to visit the EP-3E crew again, this time alone. He reported that the
Americans were in reasonably good spirits and well cared for, housed in
Chinese officers’ quarters. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the
American high-level expressions of regret were “a step in the right
direction.” Even so, the spokesman continued to insist that the United States
make a full apology. Just how Washington can make an apology that will satisfy
Beijing — yet not appear to grovel — may be a tricky business. Washington
wants a speedy resolution. But Beijing, which does nothing quickly, may try to
draw out the endgame. Apologizing in China is as complex as it is important.
The method, manner, and rank and identity of the person doing the apologizing
all matter in ways that are difficult for Westerners to grasp. In Beijing, at
least one commercial organization offers apologists-for-hire. To avoid too
much loss of face, you can pay to have a stranger say sorry to someone you
wish to apologize to. There are ancient Chinese protocols “rooted in rites and
rituals that most people have forgotten,” says a former U.S. military attach_
who served in Beijing. “Some Chinese have one foot in the 21st century and the
other in the Ming dynasty.” If and when the two sides reach a final accord,
look for fudge words in the agreement. In Chinese, there are different words
for “I’m sorry” and “I apologize.” But the English words “I’m sorry” can be
translated into either. So, in theory at least, the English-language text
could say “we’re sorry,” while the Chinese translation would suggest “we
apologize.” By such nuances are diplomatic roadblocks overcome.
The Chinese could stall the release of the EP-3E crew just to show who’s
in charge. The Chinese may also want to hold a funeral for the lost pilot
before they let go of the Americans. On Friday, Beijing was still trying to
score PR points with the pilot’s widow, Ruan Guoqin, who was shown on TV,
grief-stricken as she languished in a hospital bed. The official Xinhua News
Agency released the text of her letter to President Bush: “You are too
cowardly to voice an ‘apology’ and have been trying to shirk your
responsibility repeatedly and defame my husband groundlessly,” the letter
scolded. Beijing will want some high-level official to come over and express
sorrow. The Chinese would prefer Powell, but they may get Prueher, who can
afford a greater display of remorse. Last Friday, major Chinese newspapers
showed a photograph of the American president, whom the Chinese press
sometimes refer to as “Little Bush,” pursing his lips, eyes downcast. This may
be the Chinese propaganda machine’s attempt to squeeze a show of humility out
of an ambiguous image. The closer any American official, especially Bush,
comes to a kowtow (in imperial times, dropping to the floor before the emperor
and banging one’s forehead nine times), the more satisfied the Chinese
citizenry will be. Beijing is paying close attention to the public mood.
Washington is sometimes baffled by mixed signals from the Chinese because it
is difficult to separate public posturing from the more reasonable line often
taken in private diplomacy. At times, the rulers actively seek to inflame the
public. Late Saturday, there were rumors that the regime, in a reversal of its
earlier caution, would permit protests against the American Embassy.
That would just further prolong the standoff. Beyond the loss of the pilot
and the loss of face for either side, the long-term costs of the incident are
hard to know. Depending on how it plays out, the flap could give a boost to
hard-liners both in America and in China. The Pentagon believes that the crew
of the EP-3E was able to destroy about 80 percent of the intelligence value of
the plane. Ever since the American spy ship, the Pueblo, was seized by the
North Koreans in 1968 as the crew tried to smash its surveillance equipment
with axes and sledgehammers, American spy crews have followed careful
procedures for getting rid of the evidence. In the 25 minutes it took to fly
the damaged EP-3E to Hainan, the crew probably had enough time to erase or
destroy software programs that would tell the Chinese much about U.S. capacity
to intercept their signals and break their codes. Still, the Chinese can
examine the plane’s antennas and take apart the sophisticated computers
onboard. While American officials praised Lieutenant Osborn for safely landing
a battered plane, some old combat vets in the Pentagon grumbled that the young
pilot may have panicked as the plane plummeted after the collision. These
officials claim that Osborn could have nursed the EP-3E along to Da Nang air
base in Vietnam, some 200 miles beyond Hainan. The Vietnamese, these Pentagon
officials point out, never would have turned over the plane to the Chinese,
whom they have hated for centuries.
Such mutterings are likely to be forgotten if Osborn and his crewmates are
returned home, no doubt to a heroes’ welcome. President Bush will need to
protect his own political flank by turning defeat into victory. The
right-wingers are already complaining. An editorial in the widely read
conservative magazine The Weekly Standard is titled “A National Humiliation.”
The authors, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, both prominent hard-line
voices, argue that Bush has shown “weakness” in his approach.
That may be too harsh, but Bush may need to be more hands-on when it comes
to managing an uneasy relationship with Beijing. The cold war may be over, but
another kind of long twilight struggle has begun. Because of different values
and customs — and the sheer orneriness of an aging leadership that may feel
its legitimacy crumbling — China will always be hard to handle for an
American president. Small confrontations are sure to pop up. The trick will be
to head them off before they can become major crises.
(With John Barry, Martha Brant, Roy Gutman, Mark Hosenball and Sharon
Squassoni in Washington, Gregory Beals in Okinawa and Barbara Koh in Hainan)
Only a month ago, things were going well for President Jiang Zemin. His
suave foreign-policy guru, Deputy Minister Qian Qichen, had just completed a
successful trip to Washington. It was no easy feat. Hard-liners on both sides
of the Pacific were working to sabotage Jiang’s moderate overtures to the new
American president. The hawks in Beijing had detained two U.S.-based ethnic
Chinese scholars in February. The hawks in Washington leaked word of the
detentions — and of the recent defection by a high-ranking Chinese colonel —
to embarrass Beijing in the middle of Qian’s visit. Still the trip went
forward, and Qian won promises of a U.S.-China summit in the fall with the man
the Chinese call “Little Bush.”
That was then. Today Jiang’s carefully orchestrated smile offensive is in
ruins, as crippled as the spy plane on the tarmac in Hainan. Little Bush is
being vilified on Chinese Web sites and in the press. The air collision was a
windfall for the hard-liners in Beijing who, for the moment, may have the
upper hand. Among the chief Chinese hawks are the officers of the People’s
Liberation Army, many of whom view war with America as all but inevitable.
“The Hainan incident will help nationalists in the party and the Army get more
power,” predicts Sun Shihua of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. However
the crisis is resolved, that delicate shift in Beijing could affect the future
of both China and Sino-U.S. relations.
That’s especially true because a major succession of power is imminent in
the Middle Kingdom. Most of China’s top leaders are slated for retirement
soon, and each is trying to lace the new lineup with his own proteges. Jiang
himself is scheduled to step down as party head and president in 2002 and
2003, respectively. In addition, five of China’s top seven leaders are
expected to retire during the 16th Communist Party Congress next year. Jiang
wants to install a baby-faced technocrat, Hu Jintao, as his successor.
Parliament head Li Peng, a hard-liner, is lobbying for his own man, security
czar Luo Gan, to secure a place in the new galaxy of rising stars. Beyond that
a raft of lower-level promotions are being war-gamed and fought over,
including the critical portfolio for handling China’s entry into the World
Trade Organization. The congress “will be an extremely important event, as it
will portend a large-scale transfer of authority to the next generation of
Chinese leaders,” CIA Director George Tenet told Congress recently. “The
political jockeying has already begun, and Chinese leaders will view every
domestic- and foreign-policy decision they face through the prism of the
succession contests.”
Many ambitious Chinese politicians seem to think the best way to get ahead
is to take a hawkish line toward the United States. Chinese public opinion
toward the United States is still raw from the bombing of the embassy in
Belgrade in 1999. And Beijing officials have felt snubbed by the new American
president, who publicly labeled China a “strategic competitor” rather than the
strategic “partner” Bill Clinton had embraced. In that sense, Jiang’s early
overtures to George W. Bush were a gamble: he risked looking weak — not just
to his fellow Politburocrats, but to the increasingly nationalistic Chinese
people, whose sentiments influence their party overlords to a striking degree.
But Jiang didn’t reach the top in Chinese politics by being naive. Last
week, just as tensions began escalating, Jiang headed off on a two-week Latin
American odyssey — leaving his protege Hu in charge. “If the successor does
well in this crisis, Jiang can take credit,” says China expert David
Finkelstein, of the CNA Corp., a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “If not,
Jiang can get another one.” That can’t be comforting to Hu. “He is a cipher to
everyone,” says a Western diplomat in Beijing. “He stands for nothing in
particular.” One conspicuous gap in his resume: Hu’s lack of defense
connections. He has “no military background, no credentials, no obvious
contacts,” says Robert Karniol of Jane’s Defense Weekly. “And he will need PLA
support.”
The PLA will likely use this crisis — as well as the succession battle —
to make demands of its own. Officers are increasingly frustrated by their
declining status as China becomes more modern and market-friendly. The PLA
used to be China’s most glorious calling. But the late Deng Xiao- ping changed
all that when he mandated “to get rich is glorious.” Now, even lowly
translators have higher social standing — and greater financial rewards —
than the PLA’s officers. Adding to this sense of injury, Beijing’s antigraft
crack-down has begun to hit senior officers, further tainting the military’s
reputation.
The PLA brass is also convinced the U.S. has launched an intelligence war
against China. Beijing officials say that U.S. reconnaissance flights over
their coast have increased significantly since the 1996 missile-firing crisis
over Taiwan. PLA officers are upset about this, and no one more so than Gen.
Xiong Guangkai, the ambitious head of military intelligence — the very unit
that saw an American EP-3E fall into its lap last week. In a controversial
comment, Xiong once warned a U.S. Sinologist that in the event of nuclear war,
Americans “care more about L.A. than you do about Taipei.” And the PLA officer
who defected to the United States in December, Col. Xu Junping, was thought to
be close to Xiong.
Anger and frustration extend far beyond the military, however. Jingoistic
harangues are reverberating across China. One prominent voice belongs to Wang
Xiaodong, an influential writer and neoconservative from a movement known as
the New Left. “Bush and the head of the U.S. Pacific Command should shut their
stupid mouths, and open them again only to apologize,” he said last week. And
Wang is one of the more reasonable critics.
Against this backdrop, Jiang’s tactic last week was the pre-emptive
strike: to talk tough and prevent the hard-liners from hijacking policy. Jiang
is probably “the most pro-U.S. Chinese leader in decades,” said Bill Overholt,
a Hong Kong-based analyst with Nomura Securities. “He could easily be
pilloried for his pro-U.S. stance.” All the same, Jiang has long-range
objectives that haven’t changed — bonding with Bush, lobbying to thwart
advanced U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, joining the World Trade Organization and
bidding to host the Olympic Games in 2008. Jiang didn’t want to alienate the
West irreversibly or allow tensions to get out of hand. So he and other
moderates tried, gingerly, to contain or suppress public protests against
America. A full-blown crisis would not be good for Jiang, or for his protege.
Both men would like a smooth succession. As it is, Jiang intends to hang onto
his key post as head of the party’s all-powerful Central Military Commission
in order to help Hu ease into his role. But for Jiang to play this elder
statesman’s role — the way his predecessor Deng Xiaoping did — he needs
something like Deng’s ironclad authority. Jiang, says one Western diplomat,
“doesn’t have that kind of clout.” If the effects of the Hainan crisis linger, we may soon find out just how much he has.
(With Mahlon Meyer in Taipei and Kevin Platt and Kalum MacLeod in Beijing)
