A U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon.
The move to defuse tensions comes after the Pentagon labeled as “unsafe and unprofessional” the Chinese intercept of a Navy P-8 surveillance aircraft near Hainan Island -- one of several recent close calls. The talks, to start this month, will occur as China prepares to host President Barack Obama and 18 other heads of state in November for an Asian-Pacific summit.
“We are trying to prevent -- both sides are trying to prevent -- accidents, miscalculations, quick escalations of problems,” said Robert Work, deputy secretary of defense, describing a growing web of military ties. “We’re looking for a
China that accepts that the United States is a Pacific power.”
The surveillance flight showdown raises a central question about China’s rise: Will the world’s second-largest economy be content to play by the current rules of the global system or will it seek to rewrite them?
The core of the dispute is what activities are permitted within a country’s 200-mile (322-kilometer) offshore exclusive economic zone, where coastal states enjoy sovereign rights over marine resources. The U.S. says international law permits such flights, which have been a standard practice for decades. China objects, claiming such freedom is reserved for civilian aircraft.
A Chinese fighter in international waters buzzed a U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft... Read More
‘Broader Pattern’
“It all fits into the broader pattern of trying to establish itself as the dominant power in the region,” says Evan Braden Montgomery, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. “It’s a case of a rising power that’s feeling its oats.”Last month in Beijing, General Fan Changlong, vice chairman of China’s powerful Central Military Commission, told a visiting Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, that the U.S. should take the “correct view” of China’s military and eventually halt such flights.
“There’s a general neuralgia the Chinese military has about us spying on them,” said Michael Pillsbury, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of a forthcoming book on Chinese strategy.
The controversy over U.S. spy flights flared three months after another Sino-U.S. dispute over spying. In May, the U.S. indicted five Chinese military officers on charges of economic espionage tied to their alleged hacking into U.S. computers.
Seeking Intelligence
U.S. officials say they need to trawl for intelligence along China’s coastline because the People’s Liberation Army discloses little information about its capabilities and plans.The U.S. goal is to “understand what the future trajectory is of the PLA,” Admiral Samuel Locklear, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, said in an interview. “And it’s not clear from what they will tell you.”
Locklear says he doesn’t believe the Aug. 19 episode represented a deliberate provocation by the Chinese leadership.
He also played down the incident, saying he was inclined to give the Chinese “the benefit of the doubt.”
“I believe this was isolated to a certain group or a small group of pilots that operated out of a single location,” he said. There have been no repeat occurrences since the U.S. issued a diplomatic protest and publicized the incident.
Second Sign
China’s request to work out ways to prevent military air mishaps is the second recent sign that regional tensions might be easing. Last week, Chinese and Japanese officials concluded two days of maritime talks over issues including the fate of a disputed island chain in the East China Sea.The respite may be temporary. China’s planned exploration for oil and gas deposits in contested portions of the South China Sea along with a pending international arbitration ruling in a Philippines’ complaint will probably reignite smoldering disputes, said Ely Ratner, who worked on the State Department’s China desk in the Obama administration.
The airborne jockeying near Hainan Island occurred over one of the global economy’s main arteries. More than $5.3 trillion worth of trade, including more than 50 percent of the oil shipped around the world, passes through the South China Sea.
Hainan Island also includes a number of facilities of interest to the U.S. military. A signals intelligence site at Lingshui Air Base is responsible for vacuuming up electronic transmissions across the South China Sea, while the Longpo naval installation will house a new class of ballistic-missile-firing submarines.
Nuclear Deterrent
The Jin-class subs will carry the JL-2 nuclear missile with an estimated range of 4,600 miles, according to the Pentagon’s annual report on the Chinese military.Once operational, the sub-launched missiles will give China “its first credible sea-based nuclear deterrent, probably before the end of 2014,” Locklear told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.
Following a Chinese request last week, military and civilian representatives from the U.S. and China are expected to meet for talks over “rules of behavior for the air and maritime domain,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Pool, a Pentagon spokesman.
U.S. officials are seeking to sort out mixed signals from China over its view of what’s permissible within a country’s 200-mile economic zone.
While objecting to the U.S. surveillance flights in its region, China in July sent an electronic intelligence-gathering vessel to snoop on a U.S.-led 22-nation naval exercise off the Hawaiian cost. The Rim-of-the-Pacific exercise included four other Chinese warships.
China’s Interest
Jia Qingguo, dean of Peking University’s school of international affairs, said it was in China’s interest to preserve the freedom to carry out such flights.“As China becomes stronger and its responsibilities for maintaining world order increase, maybe it will feel this is something you have to do,” Jia said in New York last month.
Still, the August intercept was a white-knuckled demonstration of the occasional friction in the Sino-U.S. relationship. The Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft was shadowed by the Chinese fighter, which performed a barrel roll over the American plane.
The Chinese fighter also flew across the nose of the P-8 while displaying its belly, “we believe to make a point of showing its weapons load-out,” said Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary.
New Rules
The high-stakes jockeying by the two militaries demonstrates a key difference between today’s superpower rivalry and the Cold War: a lack of rules to prevent accidental war.In 1972, after more than a decade of close calls between the militaries of the U.S. and Soviet Union -- including the 1968 fatal crash of a Soviet bomber that had repeatedly buzzed an American warship -- the Cold War adversaries signed an agreement to prevent such deadly games of chicken. The Incidents at Sea treaty provided ground rules for commanders of rival ships and planes operating in close proximity.
The August incident was also a reminder of a crisis early in the George W. Bush administration: a 2001 airborne collision between a Navy EP-3 aircraft and a Chinese fighter. It killed the Chinese pilot and left the 24-person American crew prisoners of the Chinese military for 11 days.
A similar event today would occur against a different economic and military balance. China’s economy is five times its 2001 size in nominal terms, and President Xi Jinping has adopted a more muscular foreign policy than his predecessors.
China’s military spending now stands second only to that of the U.S. In March, China said it would boost its army’s budget by 12.2 percent this year to roughly $130 billion -- still less than one-quarter of the Pentagon’s budget.
“No one wants a crisis. No one wants a war,” says Montgomery. “That doesn’t mean escalation won’t happen.”
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