Lasting Impact on U.S. View of China

Although the standoff on Hainan island has ended, its impact on U.S.-China relations will be lasting.

For 11 days, the two nations found themselves in a confrontation over military and security relations to an extent not seen for 30 years. And that fact will affect long-term American attitudes, not just at the grass roots but also among policymaking elites.

“The Chinese have the power to shift the debate [on China in the United States], and they probably did shift it in the longer run,” said Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “They were in the wrong, and they blamed us.”

The consequences of these changing American attitudes will not necessarily be a new era of permanent hostility or even an upsurge in tensions between Washington and Beijing. In fact, in the short run, the new Bush administration will probably step up efforts to develop some sort of working accommodation with Beijing.

The Hainan episode demonstrated, moreover, that President Bush has, for now, greater leeway from Congress in dealing with China than did his father or President Clinton. Republican conservatives were noticeably restrained in their comments throughout the standoff.

Congress “gave the administration some running room,” Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, said in an interview Wednesday. “I don’t think they would have cut a Democratic president the same slack.”

Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) acknowledged that Republicans on Capitol Hill had held back from criticizing Bush but noted that “so did Democrats.”

“I think everyone understood that there was an opportunity for this to be resolved relatively quickly, provided that cooler heads prevailed,” Cox said.

Although there may be no immediate changes, the incident is likely to have long-term consequences for China’s political standing in this country.

China’s political support in the United States has been weakened, with many of those who have urged sympathy for China in the past failing to rush to Beijing’s side this time. At the same time, the incident will probably harden the view among some U.S. military and security officials that China is a potential long-term adversary.

The Hainan episode will increase China’s mistrust of the United States too.

“This event has increased suspicion between the two countries, and it’ll take time to regain confidence in each other,” said Yan Xuetong of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a government think tank in Beijing. “. . . Both sides will become more cautious about the relationship.”

There have been other acutely sensitive junctures since President Nixon’s 1971-72 opening to China. But each time in the past, one side or the other had reasons to discount their importance.

Americans were outraged by China’s bloody crackdown on democracy movements in 1989, but Beijing viewed its actions as an internal affair. Chinese were infuriated by the 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, an event that Washington saw as an unfortunate mistake.

This time, the significance of the confrontation couldn’t be written off by either side. It stemmed directly from American attempts to keep tabs on China’s military, and from China’s efforts to counteract these efforts.

Nations’ Clashing Security Interests

And the underlying source of this conflict--that is, the clashing security interests of the United States and China within East Asia--will continue.

“What would otherwise be a minor event, as you think through its significance, raises much more profound questions,” said Richard S. Solomon, president of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a government-funded Washington research organization.

Solomon noted that China now seems to be pushing for a reduction or end to the U.S. military presence in East Asia.

“As the gap in military capabilities [between America and China] closes, whether because of China’s modernization or a loss of American bases, then these big unresolved issues, like the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, will come to the fore,” he said.

In one respect, at least, the Hainan standoff will have little or no effect: In both Washington and Beijing, experts say they expect trade between the two countries to continue.

Reps. Doug Bereuter (R-Neb.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said Wednesday that the episode may increase opposition to continuing trade with China if the issue comes up for a vote this summer. But both said they expected China’s trade privileges to be renewed, as they have been every year since the benefits were first challenged in 1990.

The legacy of China’s detention of the plane will be concentrated in the fields of foreign policy and national security.

The standoff will strengthen perceptions that East Asia in general and the Taiwan Strait in particular rank, along with the Persian Gulf, as the most important and uncertain areas in the world for U.S. de

U.S. defense planners face some immediate decisions about the frequency of their reconnaissance flights along China’s coastline and how to give them greater support.

“Is the Navy going to send reconnaissance flights over there without an aircraft-carrier battle group to protect them?” Solomon asked. “I assume the initial effort will be to try to work out an understanding with the Chinese about these flights.”

The debate between those who believe that the United States should engage China and those who favor a harder stance won’t end.

“This will feed into both sides of the debate,” said David Finkelstein, a former Pentagon official who is now a China specialist at CNA Corp., a military research institute.

“Those who are determined to see China as a serious competitor are going to have their views reinforced by this episode. On the other hand, those who argue that we can’t ignore China are going to have their views reinforced as well.”

Underlying both sides of the policy debate is an agreement that China is of increasing significance for American security.

“We can’t on the one hand talk as though we’re shifting our strategic focus to the Asia/Pacific region because of China, and on the other hand act as though China isn’t important,” said former U.S. Ambassador to China J. Stapleton Roy.

That may be one of the lessons China meant to impress upon the Bush administration through the airplane standoff.

Some Had Questioned China’s Importance

Bush’s foreign policy team includes some veterans of the Reagan administration who argued during the 1980s that the United States was exaggerating China’s strategic importance.

The leading exponents of this view were Secretary of State George P. Shultz and an aide, Paul Wolfowitz, who is now deputy secretary of Defense in the current administration.

“When the geostrategic importance of China became the conceptual prism through which Sino-American relations were viewed, it became almost inevitable that American policymakers became overly solicitous of Chinese interests, concerns and sensitivities,” Shultz explained in his 1993 memoirs.

The Bush administration, it appears, took office eager to reinforce these views. Bush and his top aides said that within East Asia, they planned to give greater emphasis to America’s alliances with Japan and South Korea and to place less stress on U.S.-China relations.

They may, in fact, succeed in these efforts. But the standoff on Hainan, the first foreign-policy predicament of their administration, has forced them to focus quickly and intensively on China.

“The one thing we can be sure of is that from now on, relations with China are going to be hard, at best,” Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins said.

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Times staff writers Henry Chu in Hong Kong and Nick Anderson in Washington contributed to this report.