Waiting game for US plane

It's a tense standoff that's reminiscent of a bygone cold-war era, when US spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia in 1960.

Chinese officials yesterday appeared to be playing a waiting game. At press time, US officials had not yet been allowed to make contact with the crew of a Navy spy plane, loaded with eavesdropping technology, that made an emergency landing on the island of Hainan on Sunday.

In Washington, President Bush said "I'm troubled by the lack of a timely Chinese response," and three US destroyers were ordered to stay in the sea near Hainan.

The Chinese have no reason to rush their response, say sources in Beijing, and a careful and calibrated silence over what they see as a downed spy plane off their shores sends a multilayered message of "great power" toughness to the US - at a time when relations are not at their best.

"If the Chinese do not take action to resolve this quickly and cleanly, within the next day or so, it could easily escalate into an even larger diplomatic incident which will negatively impact the relationship in significant ways," says Bates Gill, a China expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The ball is in their court to resolve this."

But China may not move quickly. "Clearly, this is an opportunity for the Chinese to force the US to take them more seriously. They have long resented American reconnaissance flights in this area, which are essentially designed to gain military intelligence" about China, says Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at the John F. Kennedy School Government at Harvard University.

Both US and Chinese officials have stated repeatedly that surveillance missions and interplay between military aircraft above the South China Sea have been routine. Partly, the cause of the friction between the US and China is a dispute over what is and is not Chinese airspace in the South China Sea. But this incident highlights a more intense level of intercepts between aircraft on the two sides.

"The intercepts by the Chinese fighters over the past couple of months have become more aggressive to the point that we felt that they were endangering the safety of Chinese and American aircraft," US Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Dennis Blair told reporters in Hawaii.

The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy issued a statement yesterday saying that the intercepting jets were from a Chinese Navy air unit that took off from Lingshui airfield - the same base where the American EP-3 landed. In the past year, according to the report, Chinese jets have 13 times encountered US aircraft in a manner designed to "get close to and confront" US planes, with one Chinese commander "inserting his plane into the formation of the US craft and coming within eight meters of a plane." The center's director, Frank Liu, says the information was obtained by calling "people" in and around Hainan Island and the Lingshui airbase.

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