All the TNT in China; Wang Wei Corrigan; Hostages to Fortune 500

Washington's political class has long understood that the American public lacks the curiosity to discriminate between advertising and reality. In the wake of our Chinese contretemps it has become clear that this distinction has somehow been lost on the political class itself. "In a hostage crisis," CNN's political analyst William Schneider cheerily explained last week, "the U.S. often looks helpless, and the president looks ineffectual. And politically, that is very damaging, which is why the Bush administration insists this is not a hostage crisis."

Oh, good! But that doesn't make it not a hostage crisis. The 24 American airmen (and -women) who made an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island, after their EP-3E spy plane collided with the Chinese fighter jet that was dogging it, are not free to leave the air base where they're being held. They're being treated as spies, subjected to official calumny, and used as negotiating chips. In other words, they're hostages. And this?as even House International Relations Chair Henry Hyde was admitting by the end of last weekend?is a hostage crisis.

One thing has been clear since this crisis first broke on April Fool's Day: the Pentagon is privately less worried that the Chinese have our guys than that they have our most sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment. Hence the embarrassing malarkey the U.S. tried to put over in the first hours of the standoff about the plane's being "sovereign territory." The Chinese have the same priorities, if their quickly established pattern of disingenuous, Zhdanovite, shit-eating-grin lying is anything to go by. The country's ambassador to the U.S., Yang Jiechi, started off saying that the collision took place within Chinese airspace, but he never believed it. He now says they collided "very close to the air space of China." Very close: Let's try to remember that formulation the next time we send a fighter squadron to buzz Toronto. Very close, in this case, means within an "economic zone" that China claims for itself, extending 230 miles out to sea from every point along its vast coastline.

Indifference to the truth, as long as one can impose one's will, is a hallmark of contemporary Chinese foreign policy. In late March, the Chinese asked the government of the Philippines to stop saying China was a major source of illegal drugs there, lest it strain relations between the two countries. They didn't say they weren't doing it, still less that they'd stop it; they just told the Philippines to stop talking about it. So similarly, China may be content to bully other countries into giving it a buffer zone, but it does not expect anybody to buy its rationale. If the Chinese are going to defend this economic zone through military aggression, then there's nothing "economic" about it. If it's as vast as they would like it to be, then it embraces not just China's coastal waters, but much of the territory of Vietnam, Taiwan and Korea. (And indeed, just a week before the plane collision, a Chinese frigate came within 100 yards of the U.S.S. Bowditch, an intelligence-gathering vessel, just off the Korean coast.)

So China knows perfectly well the U.S. didn't "cause" the collision. Pretending they think so, however, is the only way they can reap the bonanza of this state-of-the-art spy plane without appearing like a thug state that has committed an act of war. If the U.S. crew are a bunch of "culprits" (as one Chinese official described them), rather than hostages, then you can strip the plane under law. Even if the crew succeeded in destroying the plane's data and equipment?with burn-boxes, hatchets and weighted bags that allow sensitive material to be dropped to the bottom of the sea?that's all the more reason to detain the crew. All 24 of these guys have top-level security clearances and, if sufficiently sleep-deprived, can explain how the equipment works. China has already interrogated them, while limiting Americans' access. (Said foreign ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi last Thursday, "If the U.S. side takes a cooperative approach, we will consider another visit.")

China has asked for the one thing we can't give: an apology. This has been requested again and again, frequently in comic ways. Chinese President Jiang Zemin, visiting Chile on a trade mission, illustrated why heads of state usually insist on using their own languages when he opined, in his weak English, that the situation could be resolved if the U.S. issued a statement that contained the words "excuse me." (If it were that simple, we could send Steve Martin over to apologize.) To which President Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer?using the tourist rule of thumb that foreigners find you easier to understand if you speak English ungrammatically?replied, "We do not understand any reason to apologize."

Indeed, there is no reason to apologize. None at all, even if we grant that there are a couple of issues that make the U.S. position problematic. First, the new, high-tech type of surveillance involves mostly listening, not looking. The photography that U-2 planes used to do is merely a more accurate and comprehensive version of what everyone does on vacation. But there's something not quite cricket about the eavesdropping done by the EP-3E: setting off anti-aircraft radar and seeing what frequencies they operate on, and intercepting broadcasts, cellphone calls, e-mails, faxes and the like. That gives us the international-relations equivalent of a Linda Tripp problem. Our second problem is the wholly unsatisfactory explanation the U.S. gave of its bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during our idiotic foray in support of the Stalinist drug dealers of Kosovo two years ago. This has left half the world's independent-minded thinkers capable of making a decent case that the United States lied about the episode, and that the embassy was hit because it contained some kind of asset (listening devices? Radars?) that were of use to Slobodan Milosevic and his Serbs.

Wang Wei Corrigan

In asking for an apology, did the Chinese totally misread us? Or did they understand us perfectly? Ours, after all, is a culture in which the word "pride" never appears without the prefatory adjective "foolish," in which practically no one sacrifices comfort for principle, in which the military is marketed as a scholarship program, and it is hard to imagine an administration being more easygoing with its citizens held hostage. Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to Newsweek, was urging a U.S. statement of "regret" for the lost pilot (the splendidly named Wang Wei) almost as soon as our plane was on the ground. He wasn't alone. Among the old China hands the administration consulted was former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who has for years raked in Croesian consulting fees from the Chinese. "I think the original language by some of our military commanders? when it got translated into Chinese, did not help matters," Kissinger unsurprisingly said. "And maybe even some of the early statements of the administration, which used the word 'demand.'" In the wake of complaints in the Chinese media that not enough tears had been shed for the Chinese fighter pilot who lost his life, Powell got to express his regret on Wednesday. Nothin' happened. On Thursday, Bush himself added, "I regret that a Chinese pilot is missing, and I regret one of their airplanes is lost." Now, that's a triangulator: Bush was trying to act like both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter at the same time.

That expression of regret produced nothing but a (presumably) government-drafted letter, purporting to be from Wang's widow Ruan Guoqin and deriding Bush as a coward. Bush decided to write her back. This was an extraordinary decision. Either the late Mr. Wang was a freelancer, a rogue element, a hot dog?in which case his last act nearly resulted in the negligent homicide of 24 Americans. Or he was acting under orders?in which case apologizing to the Chinese would be an act of grotesque gullibility. And obviously, Wang had been acting under orders, for just last Friday, according to Chinese sources, China sent 10 fighter jets to buzz another five U.S. spy planes over international waters. By Sunday, the administration was escalating its contrition even further. "We have expressed regrets," Powell said, "we've expressed our sorrow, and we are sorry that a life was lost.'' (There! Will that do, Sir?)

Powell's kowtow, as any child could have predicted, hardened rather than softened the Chinese position. It shifted the ground zero of negotiations steadily toward the Chinese side. Clearly the strategy being pursued was the Stalinist one of what's-mine-is-mine-what's-yours-is-negotiable. On Saturday, the defense minister, Chi Haotian, a real hard-guy in this episode, met with Ruan and pronounced, "It is impermissible for them to want to shirk responsibility. The People's Liberation Army does not agree to it, the Chinese people don't agree to it. The people of the world also won't agree to it." The military's powerful Liberation Army Daily demanded that the U.S. "immediately stop all military surveillance activities off the Chinese coast." And Vice Prime Minister Qian Qichen, who visited Washington just last month and is supposed to be one of our pals, wrote Powell Saturday, "Regrettably, the United States' statement on this incident so far is unacceptable. The Chinese people are extremely dissatisfied with this."

Hostages to Fortune 500

Even now, journalists, like the rest of the political class, have not quite figured out what hit them. The New York Times, on the day it broke the story, ran two columns on it, next to a three-column photo of the NCAA women's basketball finals. The Washington Post's editorial page was up in arms over practically everything?last December's Osprey clash, this week's visit of Jordan's King Abdullah?except the hostage crisis. Toward the end of last week, newspapers began to detect "signs of easing" in the Chinese stance. NBC News claimed the two sides were close to an agreement.

This confidence arises from the specious, Panglossian argument that the standoff can't go on long because China has more to lose than we do. It's "not in their long-term interests"?particularly economic?to keep these hostages. And, anyway, this is a particularly bad time. The U.S. is on the fence about whether to sell Taiwan a package of subs, and destroyers equipped with Aegis radar, the better to defend itself against the Mainlanders' hundreds of new CSS-7 missiles. And that's not all, as Henry Hyde pointed out last Saturday: "We can slow down the process," he said, "whereby China wants to be admitted to the World Trade Organization. China wants the Olympic Games in 2008. There are resolutions in Congress now objecting to that. There are lots of things we can do if we are driven to do it... They don't seem to be getting the message, however."

Does Hyde think none of this has ever occurred to the Chinese? Of course it has. Either China is angling for a better bargaining position on the Taiwan missiles (perhaps hoping for a secret agreement, like the one President Kennedy undertook, in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, to pull missiles out of Turkey), or it thinks it can get something out of this confrontation that is worth risking WTO, the Olympics and weapons sales to Taiwan over. Maybe that something is Taiwan itself. Those who say this crisis is not worth the abandonment of seven administrations' worth of "constructive engagement" should realize we're not being offered constructive engagement anymore. We're being invited to share global dominance with a bunch of authoritarian imperialists.

Last week, there was a sudden revival in the kind of Kremlinology that was a staple of Cold War coverage. Who's really in charge in Peking? asked the Washington Post's John Pomfret, in a particularly insightful article. The upshot of most such coverage was that we ought to cut Jiang Zemin a break, since he's open to the West but whipsawed between public demands for economic liberalization and army demands for repression and military muscle-flexing.

It was noted that among the good guys, Jiang's Western-leaning aide-de-camp Zeng Qing-hong had even been considered as chief of a proposed national security council, before getting frozen out. But that only left the reader worrying that the "new" China might consist of Zeng alone, and the more one read, the more likely it seemed that the real power in China rested with the princelings of the People's Liberation Army, multiculturalists so innovative they've managed to combine South American caudillismo and Russian mafia plutocracy.

One consolation is that at least we've got a Republican in the White House. At times like these, it's important to have a team at the helm with long experience in getting screwed in negotiations and then putting a brave face on it.