U.S. Takes Harder Line With China Before Talks

With the 24 crew members of a U.S. spy plane safely back on American soil and being debriefed, the Bush administration Friday adopted a much harder line toward China, asserting that a reckless Chinese pilot caused the midair collision and dismissing Beijing’s version of the incident as propaganda.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a former Navy fighter pilot, told a news conference that the Chinese F-8 fighter pilot was solely responsible for the accident. He dismissed China’s charge that the propeller-driven U.S. plane turned suddenly into the path of the jet.

And Secretary of State Colin L. Powell derided as “Chinese propaganda” the Beijing government’s claim that the U.S. statement that it was sorry over the apparent death of the Chinese pilot and the landing of the American plane in southern China without permission amounted to an apology.

A senior State Department official said the administration will inform China during a meeting next week that the United States is determined to resume reconnaissance flights off the Chinese coast, rejecting out of hand Beijing’s demand to curtail the activity that led to the accident and a tense diplomatic standoff.

“We will make sure that the Chinese know there will be continued flights,” the official said in describing plans for Wednesday’s talks. The session, which will probably be held in Beijing, is intended to sort out the aftermath of the April 1 collision of the Navy EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft and the Chinese jet.

At the Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld played a videotape of Chinese jets flying within a few feet of an earlier EP-3 flight. He said that China has been scrambling its jets to intercept U.S. reconnaissance flights for years but that, since December, the contacts have been much closer and much more dangerous.

“Why did the Chinese pilot act so aggressively?” Rumsfeld asked. “It is clear that the pilot intended to harass the crew. It was not the first time that our reconnaissance and surveillance flights flying in that area received that type of aggressive contact from interceptors.

“In recent months, there have been 44 [Chinese] interceptions of U.S. surveillance and reconnaissance flights off the coast of China,” Rumsfeld added. “Six of these were within 30 feet; two were within 10 feet.”

Early today, China accused the United States of seeking to evade responsibility by issuing the video footage.

“The U.S. side should take a cooperative attitude and not seek excuses to evade responsibility,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi told Reuters.

“I cannot see what the pictures prove,” Sun said.

Rumsfeld said the U.S. plane in the April 1 incident was on autopilot during the crucial moments leading up to the collision and was flying straight, level and slow. He said it would have been impossible for the EP-3 to have caused the accident.

Backing Rumsfeld’s version of events, U.S. diplomats in Beijing said the Chinese fighter pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Wang Wei, made two aggressively close passes by the EP-3. On the third pass, he got too close and tried to slow his aircraft. The fighter’s tail struck the American plane’s No. 1 propeller.

The F-8 broke into two pieces and plunged into the sea, the diplomats added. The Americans flew to Hainan island to make an emergency landing.

The crew made 25 to 30 attempts to broadcast distress calls and alert the Chinese about the emergency landing, Rumsfeld said. Chinese officials say they did not hear any call.

Before landing, the American plane made a 270-degree turn around the field, a standard signal that the pilot was out of contact with the control tower, Rumsfeld said, adding: “When they landed, they were greeted with armed troops.

“For 12 days, one side of the story has been presented,” Rumsfeld said. “It seemed to me, with the crew safely back in the United States, it was time to set out factually what actually took place.”

During the American crew’s detention on Hainan island in southern China, President Bush and other administration officials avoided inflammatory rhetoric, hoping to give Beijing a graceful way to end the confrontation by releasing the U.S. personnel. The tactic worked and won praise from Capitol Hill and China experts for the administration’s diplomacy.

On Friday, officials vented their anger. At the same time, they asserted that Washington and Beijing can still work cooperatively, especially on trade, which has been mutually profitable in recent years. But they said that restoring the relationship will require both sides to act responsibly.

“We’re going to step back and take a deep breath and look at the situation--calmly, by the way,” the senior State Department official told reporters. He spoke on condition of anonymity under rules imposed by department officials.

Looming over the Sino-U.S. relationship, however, is a pending sale of advanced defense systems to Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province. The administration is scheduled to announce April 24 the contents of this year’s sales. Critics of China on Capitol Hill are demanding that the administration show its anger by providing Taiwan with all the weaponry it has requested.

Talking to reporters aboard his aircraft on the flight home from a visit to the Balkans, Powell said, “We make our judgment on what to sell to Taiwan on the basis of the communiques and the [Taiwan Relations Act] and procedure and policies that you know well, and that will continue to be the basis upon which we make that judgment.”

Other officials said the administration will not link the midair incident with the Taiwan arms sale, which they said was never raised during the negotiations that led to the release of the crew.

But China regards the impending sale as a flash point in its relations with Washington. With the announcement less than two weeks away, there is no way to keep the matter separate from the reassessment of relations that is underway in both Washington and Beijing.

In Beijing, a senior American diplomat said the incident has damaged bilateral relations, but “our U.S. strategic interests remain unchanged in China. Stability and security, opportunities for all the nations in the region to peacefully pursue prosperity are what we’re after.

“China’s decision to prevent the return of our air crew for 11 days is inconsistent with the type of relationship that we both have said that we wish to have,” the diplomat added. “We do have common interests.”

Throughout the detention of the crew, the State Department took the lead in plotting U.S. policy. The department official said the administration minimized the Pentagon’s role to keep the incident “from becoming a military confrontation.”

As the negotiations progressed, U.S. officials became convinced that the Chinese military had misled its nation’s civilian officials about the nature of the accident, probably to cover up the dangerous actions of its pilot, U.S. officials said. The Chinese representatives became more reasonable as the talks continued, perhaps because they realized that their military’s version of the incident was flawed, the officials said.

Rumsfeld acknowledged that he played a lesser role in the negotiations because “I believe very strongly that in a sensitive negotiation we ought to have one set of hands on the steering wheel and not three or four.”

But in the next act of this drama, the meeting Wednesday to discuss the fallout of the confrontation, the Pentagon will be in the lead. Most of the seven or eight members of the U.S. delegation will be senior military officers. The State Department will be represented by Jim Keith, the China desk officer, a relatively junior position.

Although it is symbolically important whether the State Department or the Pentagon takes the lead, the policy differences between the agencies seem to be less in the Bush White House than in most previous administrations. Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage and Ambassador to China Joseph W. Prueher all have military backgrounds and seem to enjoy the trust of their colleagues at the Pentagon.

In Beijing, a U.S. diplomat complained that the Chinese government turned the incident into a major confrontation by rejecting Washington’s efforts to resolve it quickly.

“Our view was to try to treat this as an accident and resolve it [through] some normal channels,” the diplomat said.

“There was an opportunity to do some things well, to solve it quickly, to treat it like an accident, to have a discussion. . . . I think the Chinese missed an opportunity to resolve it well and thereby perhaps take something that was bad and strengthen the relationship,” he said.

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Times staff writer Henry Chu in Beijing contributed to this report.