With power comes responsibility

Washington must understand that the US is not the only country in the world. Other nations, like China, deserve to speak, argues Gamal Nkrumah
On Tuesday, the United States resumed provocative reconnaissance flights off the Chinese coast. Obviously US White House spokesman Ari Fleisher had his tongue in his cheek when he explained that Washington reserves the right "to preserve the peace by flying reconnaissance missions."
The White House's timing could not have been worse. Relations between China and the US have soured in recent years due to incessant US criticism of alleged gross Chinese human rights abuses, and in particular Beijing's clamp down on members of the spiritual movement, the Falun Gong. Then, on 1 April this year, relations nose-dived. The Chinese air force intercepted and forced the US EP-3E Aires II aircraft packed with long-range electronic surveillance equipment to land on Hainan Island in southern China.
China won quite a prize. The spy plane had state-of-the-art recording devices, and was equipped to wipe hard drives, destroy codes and smash key parts of an opponent's intelligence-gathering machinery. It could also track enemy positions. The crew included special systems operators, among whom were the all-important linguists who listen to and record radio transmissions. The gathered data was fed into a huge on-board computer for analysis, and sent back to defence officials in the Pentagon in Washington in encrypted form. The Chinese have, undoubtedly, had a field day rummaging through the surveillance mechanisms on the plane.
Despite vigorous US demands that the plane be returned, Beijing has gleefully explained that the EP-3 spy plane is in no condition to fly back to the US. The only other option would be to ship it home as junk. So far the Americans have found this prospect too ignominious to contemplate.
Officials in both China and the US are now making decidedly reconciliatory statements, but underlying tensions remain. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of a "misinterpretations of intentions" and China's ambassador to the US, Yang Jiechi, perhaps trying to sound reconciliatory or just diplomatic, spoke of the "roller coaster" in Sino-US relations. But if common sense has prevailed for now, relations between the two factions will remain tense so long as Washington insists on its right to fly spy planes off the Chinese coastline.
Nor is there a shortage of other potential flashpoints between Beijing and Washington. To the Chinese, the US plans for a missile defence shield appear aimed at establishing "absolute military supremacy." Nor would the Chinese be blamed if they wondered whether China itself is one of the powers the shield is to defend against. US withdrawals from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Kyoto Pact on the global environment, coupled with its going ahead with the national missile defence system, also signal the belligerent, maverick nature of the current US administration.
Another volatile issue looms closer to the Chinese mainland. The island of Taiwan, just off China's coast, is the most sensitive issue at the core of Sino-US relations. Washington supposedly subscribes to the "One China" principle, which implies that Taiwan is part of the Chinese nation. But the US flaunts the principle by persistently buttressing Taiwan's military capabilities and fuelling an arms race in East Asia. The US sells sophisticated weapons to the Taiwanese arguing that this is necessary to keep the balance of power between China and Taiwan right. This is specious. US military experts admit that Taiwan already has the qualitative weapons edge over China. Yet the US happily pours ordinance into Taiwan's armoury, forcing China to spend more on its own defences, enriching US arms producers and potentially destabilising the area.
In response to the massive arming of Taiwan, China has embarked on a sweeping naval and air force modernisation programme, introducing longer-range aircraft capable of in-flight refuelling. The US has countered by selling P-3C submarine-hunting patrol aircraft to Taiwan. Washington has also sold Taiwan four Kidd-class destroyers, eight diesel submarines and 12 anti-submarine planes. But, due at last to furious Chinese protests, Taiwan was not given the sophisticated Aegis missile system it so badly coveted. Nevertheless, the Chinese still complain that Taiwan is treated as a US protectorate and that US support for Taiwan, including arms sales, amounts to direct interference in Chinese domestic affairs. No wonder the Chinese are annoyed.
Their annoyance at presumptuous US involvement in the affairs of other sovereign nations has other causes, too. The Chinese warn that flying US surveillance planes off Chinese territorial waters and other US provocations spell the end of international law as prescribed by The Hague Conventions. They say these clearly threaten Chinese national security and violate the basic norms of international law. China says it will continue to lodge serious protests with the US over the spy flights. They are especially galled over the death of Wang Wei, the Chinese pilot killed in the collision, and the US has became a target for slighting innuendoes by the Chinese.
The UN has also been a forum where China can blunt the waywardness of US policy whim. It has become abundantly plain that China will stand firm against naked aggression and gross interference in the domestic affairs of other UN member states. At the UN security council, China repeatedly votes against US attempts to point the world in whatever direction suits its needs of the moment. China's voting pattern clearly irks Washington. The US, famously bellicose and selectively meddlesome in other governments' back yards, is less than enthusiastic as China successfully stymies its hegemonistic designs.
A less official, but perhaps just as effective method has been used to counter US hegemony. Angry Chinese hackers have been targeting official US web sites, posting pictures of the dead pilot Wang Wei. The hacked US sites include those of the US Interior Department, the House of Representatives the Surgeon General, the Department of Labour, the Department of Health and Human Services; and the Surface Transportation Board, the country's railway regulator. Chinese media reported that at least 600 web sites had been attacked.
Perhaps encouraged by China's success at standing up to Washington, the rest of the world's tolerance of maverick US behaviour is wearing thin. Washington's diplomatic embarrassment has not gone unnoticed. This week's resumption of the US spy flights coincided with a slap in the face from the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC). In a separate development, the 57th session of the UNHRC rejected a US-sponsored draft resolution on the human rights situation in China. This is the tenth time in as many years that UNHRC has rejected the motion.
The Third World is rejecting the US pose as the world's human rights policeman, saying Washington pretends to stand for democracy, human rights and "fundamental freedoms" while its own domestic record is deplorable, as the US response to last month's rioting by African Americans in Cincinnati, Ohio, demonstrates. The US must put its own house in order before pontificating about respect for human rights, critics say.
The emergence of power politics under the guise of the moral authority of the Western powers, led by the US, also appears to the Third World as a threat to international peace and security. The US human rights policy, used as a pretext to interference in the domestic affairs of less-developed nations, is unacceptable to the vast majority.
The debate about One China will not go away. The new US administration should recognise that China, and the rest of the world, are entitled to their own approach and security concerns. Congress will complain that in the wake of the spy plane standoff, US companies may find it harder to win contracts in China. Would that Washington could think beyond the bottom line of America's corporations and start to act like a responsible world power.
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Spied off course 12 - 18 April 2001
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