No General Tso for the crew of the Kitty Hawk.
The USS Kitty Hawk and its task force were supposed to spend Thanksgiving in Hong Kong, at the invitation of the Chinese. Because the Kitty Hawk is the lone carrier stationed overseas, many of the families of the sailors and Marines on board took the relatively short trip from Japan to Hong Kong to spend the holiday with their active duty love ones. But the Chinese scuttled the visit, without any apparent reason, leaving families stranded in Hong Kong, and the sailors stuck aboard their ships in the South China Sea. At FP Passport, Mike Boyer points to one possible reason for China’s bad manners–a live-fire exercise off the Chinese coast that would have “have put U.S. ships (and their prying eyes) in a position that Beijing would consider too close for comfort.” Boyer also links a piece by Tim Johnson, who speculates this may be payback for Bush’s chummy visit with the Dalai Lama. On Johnson’s blog, China Rises (bookmark it!), he also posts a transcript of a press conference with Admiral Keating, which shows the level of frustration at the Pentagon with the Chinese decision:
Keating later complains of a Chinese affront to the Navy far worse than the Kitty Hawk fiasco–China’s refusal to grant two U.S. minesweepers safe harbor in Hong Kong after being caught in a dangerous storm:
Okay, so they’re busting the Navy’s chops a bit with the Kitty Hawk visit. It’s bad form, but I suspect these are the kind of silly games that the Soviet and U.S. military played for decades. But rejecting a request for safe harbor in a storm–as Keating says, this pretty much destroys any good will or trust that has been built between the Navy and the Chinese since the 2001 spy plane incident. For good measure, Johnson adds that while the Chinese media has made little mention of the dust up over the Kitty Hawk, the official press has been flooding the zone with coverage of “the arrival of the Chinese missile destroyer Shenzhen in Tokyo for a four-day visit, casting it as a sign of ‘new vigor’ in relations between Beijing and Tokyo.”
