BY EVA CHENG
It's not hard to understand why the unauthorised landing of a US spy plane on China's southern Hainan island on April 1 sparked an international diplomatic crisis. Just turn the tables.
Imagine what Washington would have done if a Chinese spy plane tried to land at a US military base without even asking for permission, after having provocatively spied along US coasts, knocked off a US jet which tried to intercept it and ignored repeated US protests.
If the US had shot this fictional Chinese spy plane down before it was even able to land, how many figures in the US establishment or other Western powers would have raised an objection? Would they not have justified it as an act of self-defence?
And if the US authorities did allow the intruding, clearly hostile, Chinese plane to land safely, would the US not have detained the crew and stripped the plane to ascertain what its mission might have been?
If then China demanded the return of its plane and crew, asserting that the plane on US land was Chinese sovereign territory, would not the US have refused to listen?
But the crucial difference between this imaginary scenario and the real one is that the actual intruder was the United States, the world's foremost military power which thinks it can do as it likes.
Despite being the violated party, China's reaction was rather mild. On the contrary, it was the US which went on a rampage to assert its "rights" — the logic of the bully.
While the death of a Chinese jet pilot weighed little in US officials' considerations, notwithstanding its forced and unwilling statements of "regret" and "sorrow", they were hysterical in their demands for the return of their military personnel, who were eventually released on April 14. Just imagine what they would have done if any of them had been hurt.
Spy missions
Under the circumstances, China's main demand, that the US should promise to call off future similar spy missions, is hardly unreasonable. This was rejected outright by US President George W. Bush, who is still pushing to have the US plane returned.
John Pike, director of private defence policy organisation GlobalSecurity.org, likened the EP-3E to "a really big flying tape recorder". With dozens of sensitive antennae, it can pluck from the atmosphere all sorts of information — signals from radar, radio, mobile phones, email — many of which would have high real-time military value.
Armed with relevant radar information, for example, the US could develop ways to jam and neutralise the Chinese radars, Jeffrey Richelson of the privately-run National Security Archive told Associated Press on April 11.
The US's aerial spy program is only one of many means by which it maintain its dominance as the top imperialist power.
Such spying missions have attracted many protests in the past. According to the September 1992 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Soviet Union lodged a formal diplomatic protest against such flights as early as January 1948, but the US affirmed its right to spy, on the grounds that no territorial violation occurred.
This, however, hasn't been a never-violated golden rule. The first recorded interception of a US spy plane occurred on October 22, 1949, by Soviet fighter jet RB-29, and the first downing of a US spy plane took place on April 8, 1950 over the Baltic.
Many more US spy planes have been lost since then. Two notable examples, records the BAS, were the June 27, 1956 forced grounding of a C-118 (the personal jet of then central intelligence chief, Allen Dulles) as it was caught flying over Soviet Armenia, and the September 2, 1958 downing of an EC-130, also over Armenia.
The nine crew on the C-118 were only captured but, in the case of the EC-130, six were killed and 11 imprisoned after the plane was shot down. The Soviets released a transcript of the EC-130's broadcasts to prove its spy mission.
Attempts to fly over the target territories, rather than skirting the borders, became more regular soon after the introduction of more powerful high-altitude cameras, a period marked by the infamous 1960 incident in which a US U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia. Pilot Gary Powers was captured and held for 21 months before being released in a swap for a Soviet spy.
Spying by satellites arrived not long after and has increasingly become a powerful alternative to aerial eavesdropping flights. But spying flights never stopped. One reason, undoubtedly, is to gauge the target nation's response to such provocations and their interception speed and capability.
Test response
The US is prepared to go to great lengths to solicit such responses. On August 31 1983, the Korean airliner Flight 007 was shot down over Sakhalin Island, with the loss of 269 civilian lives, after veering way into Soviet territory. There are various theories about what exactly happened, but it's clear US military and intelligence gathering missions were in some way involved.
Most analysts are convinced that KAL 007's off-course flight was intentional. One book, Michel Brun's Incident at Sakhalin: The True Mission of the KAL Flight 007, released in 1996, even claims that, as well as KAL 007, about 10 US military aircraft invaded Soviet airspace at the same time and were shot down in an air battle lasting more than two hours, in which more than 30 military personnel were killed.
From China's highly restrained response to the April 1 intrusion, Bush and his Republican China-bashers could have concluded they can push things much further in future.
China's response was very different on February 10, 1970 when a pilotless US military plane spied near or over Hainan Island. China shot it down.
In a remarkable resemblance to the latest Hainan incident, US State Department official Harry Thayer warned the government in a February 19, 1970 memo not to apologise for the February 10 event because it might "lead the Chinese to press us to take the next step of foreswearing such acts for the future".
He added, "An apology would not alter the Chinese view of the drone's presence as a hostile act, and the Chinese in any event would consider the apology to be a hypocritical gesture having nothing to do with the basic US attitude regarding reconnaissance".
Bush's final near-empty apology for the April 1 event was similarly hypocritical and China's President Jiang Zemin knew it. But he still demanded one because, while China can't afford to retaliate militarily, Jiang can ill-afford to let the whole incident wind down without even a symbolic apology. The internal pressure from his political rivals could prove to be too damaging.
Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the Chinese ruling bureaucracy can't afford to engage in a real showdown with the US. Its dependence on the world market, especially on the US economy, has never been greater, thanks to its escalating capitalist transformation. Its pending entry to the World Trade Organisation is a crucial step to cement this integration — and the US still has the power to block it. Both Bush and Jiang know their cards.
Such clout has enabled the US to get away with a lot. Whichever of the two major parties is in charge, Washington can sustain a massive China-bashing campaign with few consequences. Inside Bill Clinton's velvet glove was a die-hard anti-China policy, which has been pursued even more aggressively by the Republicans.
Despite major steps to restore capitalism, the principal gains of the 1949 revolution have not been completely eroded. A decisive overturning of such gains is the US's key goal and until that is achieved, its China-bashing agenda and military provocations are unlikely to stop.