Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told President George W. Bush on Wednesday that Beijing’s refusal to let a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier into Hong Kong was a “misunderstanding,” the White House said.
There’s no additional explanation offered, but it strikes me that the Chinese are being more than a little reckless. “Misunderstandings” involving aircraft carriers are, by their nature, dangerous for all parties involved. At the beginning of the year, Bill Gertz reported on another Chinese “misunderstanding” that involved the Kitty Hawk:
The admiral in charge of the U.S. Pacific Fleet pressed Chinese military leaders to explain why an armed submarine challenged a U.S. aircraft carrier in the western Pacific by sailing within five miles of the warship, U.S. defense officials said. The Chinese responded by claiming the Song-class submarine that surfaced near the USS Kitty Hawk on Oct. 27 was there by accident, and that it did not shadow the warship before making its presence known, the officials said. Defense officials familiar with reports of closed-door military meetings in Beijing, Shanghai and Zhanjiang privately doubted the Chinese explanations and said it is more likely the Song-class diesel electric submarine was practicing anti-aircraft carrier operations.
A few months earlier, Larry Wortzel, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and a leading expert on Chinese military policy, spoke on China’s military ambitions in space at the National Press Club:
With respect to the goal the PLA has set of attacking a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group at sea, we don’t know, from their writings, whether their war plans–believe it or not, we all have war plans–are for a conventional, a nuclear or a high-altitude electro-magnetic pulse burst. But the PLA sees the goal of attacking a deployed American carrier battle group as realistic and achievable. Think of the implications of that! The Enterprise docked in Norfolk just before Thanksgiving and there are 5,000 people on the Enterprise alone. The casualties at Pearl Harbor reached only 2,400. The World Trade Center wasn’t much more than 2,400. Thus, when PLA officers routinely talk about being able to attack and sink an American aircraft carrier, they aren’t thinking really hard about what comes back at them after that. I would argue that one of the implications of what seems to be serious research and writing in China is that the United States ought to be engaged in equally serious defense talks with the senior PLA leaders on what the red lines are in warfare. The anti-satellite programs that I talked about affect our strategic warning. The Chinese need to understand that we are very sensitive about interference with our strategic warning and about the ability of the United States to gather indications of hostility. When another nation interferes with that capability, we tend to take that as an indication that the nation may want to attack us. If you have been in the strategic warning system awhile, you know that the United States talked to the Soviets about this at great length. We still talk to the Russians about it. Senior American defense and foreign policy leaders have not had this dialogue with the Chinese. The PLA won’t even get serious about a dialogue with the Pacific commander about naval incidents at sea, to make sure that the next time a Song submarine broaches the surface, it doesn’t do it under the Kitty Hawk carrier battle group and bump into it. The PLA has avoided such discussions despite repeated requests from the U.S., and we need to talk to them about these matters.
The Chinese seem to think that putting these incidents off to mere “misunderstandings” is sufficient, but the behavior is in fact unbelievably reckless. They have no sense of what our red lines are, and this latest snub of the Kitty Hawk is unlikely to reduce the chance of escalation the next time we have a misunderstanding at sea.
