China to exploit gains from U.S. `regrets'

By F. J. Khergamvala

TOKYO, APRIL 8. As the United States and China play out the end game over the air collision incident a week ago, attention has been diverted from an important event to take place for the Chinese people next week. The leadership should then certainly exploit the gains of the compromise being negotiated with the U.S. on ending the saga of the U.S. Navy EP-3E surveillance mission.

A week from now, bookstores and Internet users in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese community in the U.S. will have full access to the Chinese language version of the so- called Tiananmen Papers, purportedly an authentic account of the behind- the-scenes deliberations among the leadership in June 1989 on the clampdown on pro-democracy protestors.

Earlier this year saw the release of the abridged English version, edited by Mr. Andrew Nathan, Mr. Perry Link, and Prof. Orville Schell, all U.S. Sinologists. The source material was by a person with the pseudonym, Zhang Liang.

It is the much more complete Chinese version, available to a far larger and directly better informed audience in its own language that will be of great importance to the leadership of the Communist Party, with a view to the big party shake-up expected in September 2002. Mr. Jiang and the ideological moderates on the one hand, and the conservatives, on the other, will weigh and try to influence public opinion on the Chinese version of the Papers.

The outcome of the current episode and the way Beijing has extracted some form of regrets from the U.S. can easily be used by Mr. Jiang and his public machinery to distract attention from certain revelations which were not in the English version but may be in the Chinese one. Should there be some nasty disclosures in the Chinese version, the Chinese media will probably resort to the well worn usage of the common foreign hand behind Tiananmen and behind the air incident. In its language, the ``running dogs of foreign, anti-Chinese forces.''

The only thing that can spoil Mr. Jiang's ``party'' is that after getting the spy plane's 24 crew back in U.S., Mr. George W. Bush determines that Taiwan should have either one or more of the four requested Arleigh-Burke class vessels with the sophisticated Aegis battle management system, that can also be used to base the Theatre Missile Defence.

Every incident like the one last week provokes hardliners on both sides to make the relationship captive to local politics. Mr. Bush will have to be cautious about giving in to pro-Taiwan conservatives at home and also give an upper hand to some of the hardline Generals in the Chinese People's Liberation Army who have felt since 1995 that Mr. Jiang has been too indulgent on Taiwan.

China's strong handling of this crisis came at an opportune moment. Moreover, it does no harm at all to force the U.S. to remind itself that in such incidents, the U.S. has been truly a dirty player. After the Belgrade embassy bombing in May 1999, Beijing had no hostages, no cards to play, except avenge itself with stones at U.S. offices in the mainland.

In 1993, the U.S. Navy, in an action that by any definition falls under state-organised terrorism, seized the Chinese freighter `Lin He' on grounds that China was shipping suspicious chemical weapons related cargo to Iran. Chinese intelligence had actually duped the U.S. into believing that this was dangerous cargo, but in the absence of anything to trade off, it could not even get the U.S. to apologise.

This time, obviously nothing was planned, but once China had the uniformed hostages and the plane, all that Beijing had to do was to ignore superpower bluff and bluster that China had no right to examine the plane which was on Chinese territory, even though the U.S. claimed for itself the right to board the Chinese ship `Lin He' in international waters in 1993.

Almost the entire U.S. media has been dishonest to its readers on these background facts. In 1968, the U.S. gave an apology and bought the release from North Korea of the crew of the American spy ship, the U.S.S. Pueblo. But, once the crew was safely back in the U.S., it retracted the apology.

The advantage is all Mr. Jiang's to eke, if he chooses to highlight how China has stood up, perhaps humbled the world's mightiest power to climb down from the haughty legal and moral posture it adopted shortly after the American spy plane landed on Chinese soil.

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Section  : International
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