April 18, 2002
U.S.-Chinese relations stronger despite
plane flap
By Steve Friess
Special for USA TODAY
A year ago, Washington and Beijing seemed
to be heading toward a frightening confrontation over China's
detention of the crew of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane that
collided with a Chinese fighter jet.
Now, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks
and the violence in the Middle East, the crisis over the captivity
of the Navy crew in Southern China for 11 days has all but been
forgotten, and U.S.-Chinese relations, ironically, have grown
stronger from the incident.
That's what some crewmembers who lived
through the ordeal believe is the unexpected legacy of the incident.
"In a strange way, it did solidify the
relationship between the U.S. and China," says Aviation Machinist's
Mate Senior Chief Nicholas Mellos, 46, who is now stationed
in Jacksonville. "I think the relationship is better than what
they made it out to be at the time."
Lt. Shane Osborn, 28, the pilot who safely
landed the crippled Navy plane, says the standoff "was a huge
deal (that) could have turned into something much worse. Then
we had something much, much larger happen to us on Sept. 11.
That changed the scope of things."
After the collision on April 1, 2001,
between the U.S. EP-3 plane and the Chinese fighter, whose pilot
was killed, the world anxiously wondered whether the standoff
that kept 24 Americans penned up in a hotel on Hainan Island
might lead to hostilities between the world's mightiest nation
and its most populous one.
China's state-run news media charged
that the EP-3 had been on a spy mission in Chinese airspace,
deliberately struck the fighter and landed on Hainan without
permission. President Bush expressed outrage that the Chinese
limited U.S. officials' access to the crew and insisted that
Chinese pilot Wang Wei had caused the crash by flying too close
to the EP-3 over international waters to taunt the crew.
The crisis ended when the United States
issued a statement that it was "very sorry" the incident occurred,
a phrase China interpreted to mean that Washington had taken
full responsibility. The two sides squabbled into the summer
over the return of the Navy plane, and disputes continue over
how much Washington will pay China for housing the crew and
storing the plane.
Since then, both sides, which became
alarmed that the crisis might have let relations spiral out
of control, have worked hard to strengthen bonds. Washington
and Beijing agree that growing commerce between their two countries
is too great to jeopardize again, even though Chinese officials
continue to protest Bush's close ties with Taiwan, which Beijing
considers a renegade island that is part of China.
Examples of the new warmth:
* Bush has traveled to China twice, and
Secretary of State Colin Powell has been there three times.
China's presidential heir apparent Hu Jintao comes to Washington
on May 1, and President Jiang Zemin is expected to visit in
the fall. Not even the largest U.S. sale of weapons to Taiwan
in decades has stopped these summits.
* The Bush administration helped China
join the World Trade Organization in November and did not try
to thwart Beijing's successful bid to land the 2008 Olympics.
Bush, who came into office calling China a "strategic competitor,"
now describes ties as "constructive, cooperative and candid."
* Chinese news media have stopped claiming
that the EP-3 "rammed" the fighter to "murder" Wang, and now
use more neutral terms to describe the incident. For being pawns
in the international crisis, the U.S. crewmembers returned as
national heroes. Osborn wrote an autobiography. Mellos recently
married a woman he dated decades ago and who contacted him up
after seeing his picture on the cover of USA TODAY.
And several crewmembers have taken on
roles in the war on terrorism. Osborn and Lt. John Comerford
are back together flying EP-3 surveillance missions — this time
over Afghanistan.
The Sept. 11 attacks and the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict might have replaced the EP-3 incident in the public
consciousness, but that doesn't diminish the incident's importance,
experts say.
"It really showed that the Sino-U.S.
relationship was not nearly as fragile as other people thought,
and that is significant," says Elizabeth Economy, director of
Asian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Comerford, 27, has no regrets that the
war on terrorism has made people forget about his captivity
a year ago. "We really appreciate the chance to fly over there
in Afghanistan," he says. "I'm really glad I got to participate
in another big endeavor like that."
