Sunday's collision of a US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane with a PLA fighter jet near Hainan Island was perhaps Beijing's April Fool's Day gift to US President George W. Bush. The accident has thrown a spanner into the gradual easing of US-China relations. Chinese nationalism and anti-American sentiments are once again on the rise in China, hastening the development of a competitive and even confrontational relationship. Taiwan may be forced to enter a military race as tensions rise in the Strait.
The US and China, quite naturally, have differing versions of the mid-air collision. The US says the EP-3 was flying in international air space and Beijing had no right to intercept it. Beijing says the plane intruded into Chinese airspace. The plane had taken off from a US base in Okinawa. According to Taiwan military sources (the military had monitored the plane's flight) the US plane was in international airspace when the collision occurred. A few days before the collision, the US military had lodged a complaint with the PLA about overly aggressive surveillance -- an indication that the two air forces have been playing a game of cat and mouse for some time. Only the EP-3 crew can confirm what actually caused the collision.
An increasingly testy relationship has been developing between Beijing and Washington since the Bush administration defined China as a competitor. Disputes have arisen one after another: the US' agreement to sign a UN resolution condemning the human rights situation in China, Beijing's iron-fisted suppression of the Falun Gong sect, China's helping Iraq build a fiber-optic network that could be used for military purposes, Beijing's opposition to the National Missile Defense and Theater Missile Defense programs, US arms sales to Taiwan, the US' massive trade deficit with China, the slowness of China's entry into the WTO, the arrests of several Chinese-American or US-based Chinese scholars, including Gao Zhan (高瞻) and Li Shaomin (李少民) -- the list goes on. Almost all these disputes are disadvantageous to Beijing. Not surprisingly, Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen (錢其琛) did not have many bargaining chips to use during his recent US visit, since Washington does not have any compelling reason to give in to Beijing's demands regarding arms sales to Taiwan.
But Beijing has been setting the stage for a wave of anti-US protests -- and a repeat of the scenes that followed the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. And Beijing now has some more human bargaining chips in addition to the academics it has detained -- the 24 crew members of the EP-3. The US may be asked to pay a good ransom for the these Hainan Island hostages, perhaps a "not for sale" sign when the issue of AEGIS-equipped destroyers comes up during the US-Taiwan arms talks this month.
Sunday's collision shows that reconnaissance missions between the US and China are entering a stage of near-Cold War intensity. Taiwan would inevitably become a front-line state in any clash of these two titans. This accident may prompt the US to further help Taiwan strengthen its military capabilities. But on the other hand, deteriorating US-China relations might further aggravate already icy cross-strait relations. This would be detrimental to the peaceful "integration" advocated by President Chen Shui-bian
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