Military Ties With China to Resume

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that he has given a limited go-ahead to resume military-to-military contacts with China now that this spring’s spy plane incident is being resolved.

Rumsfeld said, as he has in the recent past, that it was inappropriate to conduct normal business with China during the 11 days in April that the crew of a Navy EP-3 surveillance plane was detained on Hainan island or during the weeks that Beijing dragged out negotiations over release of the plane.

Now that China has agreed to release the damaged plane--although not on the terms the United States had originally sought--some contacts with the Chinese military will resume in the weeks ahead, he said. He spoke after a published report that he had cut off virtually all contacts with the Chinese armed forces.

“I’ve approved a number” of future contacts with the Chinese military that require advance planning, he told reporters in an interview en route from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, where he was scheduled to hold meetings with senior government officials today.

However, he did not mention any specific military-to-military contacts that he has approved.

“I have been approving things as we’ve gone along,” he said. “Some of those things are down the road.” He noted that the Pentagon had requested permission for a mine countermeasures support ship, the Inchon, to visit Hong Kong but that China refused.

The New York Times reported that Rumsfeld has not approved any direct contact between American and Chinese military officers in recent months and that his policy of considering contacts case by case is prompting concern among China experts within the U.S. military. They say the policy strengthens the hand of those in China who view America as an enemy.

In a forceful tone, Rumsfeld emphasized his view that China’s holding of the EP-3 crew could not have gone unanswered. Beijing blamed the Navy spy plane with running into a Chinese fighter jet--whose pilot is missing and presumed dead--but the U.S. government insists that the fighter was at fault and that China should not have held either the crew or the plane.

“Our plane was run into, and the crew landed in an emergency on the island and they were detained,” he said. “They were not allowed to call anybody for a long period of time--days and days. We did not know how long they would be detained. It clearly was not business as usual.

“And there is no question that we took steps to avoid having other Americans arrive in that country and find that they were not welcomed or that they might be detained. . . . As a result, I indicated that I did not want ships or planes or American military forces in the country during that period.”