In the sometimes testy rivalry between Washington and Beijing, good manners count. A recent amendment to a US-China accord on safe encounters between their military pilots calls for keeping a safe distance, communicating clearly and keeping a lid on rude body language.
“Military aircrew should refrain from the use of uncivil language or unfriendly physical gestures,” the third amendment to the safety memorandum states.
The stipulation shows the degree to which the two sides hope to avoid unintended events, although there is no evidence that insulting behavior has been a factor in any recent encounters.
It comes as the two nations see themselves operating in ever closer contact, a consequence of China’s robust assertions of its South China Sea maritime claims and a renewed US focus on Asia that is to see 60 percent of the US Navy fleet assigned to the region.
The amendment was signed shortly before a state visit last month to Washington by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), who has exerted stronger control over the armed forces than any of his predecessors since former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) in the late 1980s.
That came on the heels of a Sept. 15 incident in which two Chinese fighter-bombers made what the US Pacific Command described as an unsafe interception of a US Air Force RC-135 surveillance airplane patrolling about 130km off the Chinese coast.
In an earlier incident, a Chinese fighter jet executed a barrel roll as it came within 9m of a US Navy P-8 Poseidon surveillance airplane over the South China Sea in August last year.
In the most serious such incident, aircraft from the two nations collided over the South China Sea in 2001, killing a Chinese fighter pilot and forcing a heavily damaged US Navy EP-3 surveillance airplane to land at a Chinese base. China interrogated and detained the 24 crew members for more than a week, sparking the biggest crisis in bilateral relations in more than a decade.
In that case, the lost Chinese pilot, Wang Wei (王偉), had previously flown close enough to US aircraft for their crew to see his e-mail address written on a piece of paper held up inside his cockpit.
Within the Chinese military’s “environment of bravado,” the actions of rogue pilots can be hard to rein in, said Denny Roy, an expert on the Chinese military at the East-West Center in Hawaii.
However, by signing the memorandum and its annexes, China wants to indicate to the US that aggressive challenges in the air are not necessarily national policy, Roy said.
“It is a positive step in bilateral relations, because it indicates a Chinese interest in stability and in advancing military-to-military relations,” Roy said.
Tensions have also risen over China’s declaration of an air-defense identification zone over disputed islands in the East China Sea in 2013. The US, Japan and others have refused to recognize the move because the area encompassed by the zone includes territory controlled by Japan. China has so far made little effort at enforcing it.
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