Regret May Not Be Good Enough

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LIU JIN/AFP

A Chinese military policeman watches the U.S. ambassador's car

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Jiang's hard line revealed the weakness of his position at home. The crisis hit at the most delicate moment in his career since he took power after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. More than anyone else, he was responsible for restoring U.S.-China relations after that uprising. But Jiang turns 75 this year and is likely to resign his position at a party conference in the fall of 2002. The question is, who will replace him and his allies, and which, if any, of his current titles will he be allowed to keep? So far he has fared badly, failing to maneuver his followers into key spots or secure a position for himself. His opponents, especially among military hard-liners, consider him too soft, too willing to submit to U.S. demands. So when word of the midair collision reached his home in the cloistered Zhongnanhai leadership compound in central Beijing, Jiang seized his chance to consolidate power by acting tough.

He wasn't the only one who saw an opportunity and took it. The Chinese military has been feeling sensitive ever since a high-level officer defected to the U.S. last December. Jiang has forced the People's Liberation Army to withdraw from many of its lucrative business enterprises, though he has tried to raise morale by boosting defense spending 18 percent this year. But many officers still feel that China has grown too chummy with the U.S. They resent the U.S. surveillance flights along the Chinese coastline — something the U.S. would never tolerate on its borders — and they resent the fact that the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Japan could defeat China's entire navy. "The military likes to have an enemy, and that's how it sees the U.S.," says a former Chinese official who had close contacts with the army. "It will insist that Jiang hang tough."

Though authoritarian leaders are supposed to be immune to polls and popular will, Jiang also had to worry about the Chinese public. Anger at the U.S. could easily twist into fury at him for failing to defend the motherland. "If Mao Zedong were the leader today, he would have shot down the American plane," says Li Hua, a physics student from Shanghai, who counts KFC as her favorite takeout. "But our leaders now don't have the guts to get in a fight." At first, this incident looked like a reprise of the Belgrade embassy bombing. Anyone watching the official newscasts was led to believe that the U.S. plane had intentionally caused the collision. Variations on "Kill the imperialist American pigs" littered Chinese Internet message boards. But during the street demonstrations that followed the Belgrade bombing, the leaders learned how hard it could be to control a passionate crowd and feared that anger could turn inward. This time anti-U.S. demonstrations were forbidden and posters taken down.

Even before the collision, anger at the U.S. was running high. Beijing felt that the Bush administration had failed to give China credit for new policies designed to reach out to Washington. In November, China agreed to control its missile exports, but Bush condemned it for selling a communications cable to Iraq. In January, China adopted a less threatening policy toward Taiwan; Bush still might sell Aegis air-defense radar to the island. If he does, "relations with the U.S. could worsen permanently, and Jiang will lose the greatest pillar of his legitimacy," says an Asian diplomat in Beijing. Last month China dispatched foreign policy mandarin Qian Qichen to Washington to patch up relations; Bush chose to receive Japan's doomed prime minister first, underscoring Tokyo's privileged position. "I'm frustrated," says a Chinese foreign policy adviser criticized by leaders for being too pro-U.S. "China might pay a price, but the Bush administration needs to be taught a lesson."

Of course, nothing is that simple. Last year Beijing enjoyed a trade surplus of $83 billion with the U.S., its top export market, and U.S. businesses invested about $4 billion in China. These investors have become Beijing's most useful lobbyists in Washington. They thwarted Clinton's initial plan to link China's trade status with human rights and helped win Washington's support for China's entry into the World Trade Organization. China needs that relationship because, to some extent, the leadership's power rests on rising living standards that depend on growing trade.

If Bush and Jiang faced similar internal crosswinds, they did so within very different time frames. The Chinese have been waiting 50 years for Japan to apologize for its conduct in World War II. Bush is living in a 24-hour news cycle, in which impatience is a virtue. "Bush's tough instincts were right," says a Republican lobbyist, "but they were counterproductive. He should have known that the Chinese don't respond well to bluster." It would have been better, say several GOP foreign policy veterans, to be belligerent in private and play a sweeter song in public. "By saying we won't apologize," says a veteran, "we set the bar way too high."

By Wednesday, you could hear the nuance sliding back into Washington's official statements. At a meeting that morning in the Oval Office, Bush told his advisers he wanted to find a "way out." Senior staff members brought up whether Bush should go ahead as planned and throw out the first pitch at a baseball game Friday. Would that look too frivolous if the servicemen and women were still detained? "We're going," said Bush immediately. His advisers agreed. "He's sending a clear message that this is serious but his schedule is not going to change," said a White House official. "Government business goes on."

It took until Wednesday night for the diplomats to finally get to work. "We aren't talking past each other anymore," said a senior State Department official. "We're not spitting in each other's faces quite so much." Officials were pulling all-nighters on both ends. Powell was called at 2:30 a.m. Thursday for an update.

It was Powell who finally splashed through the verbal puddles and repeated for the cameras his earlier, little noticed expression of "regret" for the loss of the Chinese plane and pilot. The letter that accompanied his statement signaled even more movement. It raised the possibility of a joint investigation into what had happened or an exchange of explanations. "Once we said 'regret' and 'exchange explanations,' they came back to us still saying 'apologize, investigate,' but also saying 'Let's discuss how this can work.' Now they're talking mechanisms," said the State Department official.

By Thursday, when Bush stood before a bundle of newspaper editors, he had already moved to amend his China policy. While affirming that China was a competitor, he added, "But that doesn't mean we can't find areas in which we can partner. The economy's a place where we can partner." Progress picked up Friday as the diplomats began hammering out language for an exchange of drafts of a letter that might pave the way for the crew's release. When Bush met with Rice and Cheney to dissect the regret/apology language for the letter to be signed by Ambassador Joseph Prueher, he wanted everyone in the room to know that he would have the final word on whatever they came up with. "If I don't like what the letter says, it's not going," he told Rice. Later, when Sealock briefed Bush and Powell on his latest talks with the Chinese, Bush made it clear that he didn't want to play the blame game. "We don't need to be pointing fingers, he said. "This is a delicate moment."

Still, the whole exercise put Bush at odds with some in Congress and the Pentagon who had no use for subtlety. "After we get our people out, we should denounce all these equivocal statements we made to spring them," a senior Navy officer griped. "And then we should bomb the damn plane on the tarmac." The White House saw that it was also still dealing with competing constituencies on the Chinese end. After 48 hours of thaw, Vice Premier Qian Qichen declared Saturday that the expressions of regret were "still unacceptable." The U.S., he said, must "apologize to the Chinese people. This is the key issue to solving the problem."

Former U.S. ambassador to China James Lilley says the whole standoff reveals the fault line in U.S.-China relations: "They have extended sovereignty; we have forward deployment." Clashes like this are going to happen until an arrangement similar to the one between the Soviets and Americans can be worked out. "This could be therapeutic, especially if it forces both sides to work out rules of engagement," Lilley says. "They don't want this to happen again, and we don't want it to happen again."


Reported by Jay Branegan, Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson and Mark Thompson/ Washington, Matthew Forney/Beijing and Hannah Beech/Hainan Island

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