A touch of irony surfaced when a US destroyer patrolling the South China Sea sailed to the aid of the US ocean surveillance ship Impeccable after it was harassed by three Chinese government vessels and two trawlers.
The US warship was the USS Chung-Hoon, named for a Chinese-American naval officer awarded the Navy Cross, the nation’s second-highest combat decoration, for heroic action against Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War II. The late Gordon Chung-Hoon, of Hawaii, retired as a two-star admiral in 1959 and his namesake ship’s home port is Pearl Harbor.
That warship could outrun, out-maneuver and outgun the Chinese ships on the scene, but arrived after the incident to warn the Chinese not to return. The surveillance ship Impeccable resumed her mission, mapping the treacherous sea floor, islands, atolls, rocks, banks and reefs, and gathering intelligence on Chinese submarines based on Hainan Island, 120km away.
This confrontation, however, was far more than a skirmish at sea. It has turned into an early test for US President Barack Obama, who is scheduled to meet Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) at the G20 economic summit meeting in London next month. Sino-US military relations are certain to be on the agenda.
A question being addressed in Pacific Command headquarters above Pearl Harbor is whether political authorities in Beijing ordered the assault or if the People Liberation Army (PLA) mounted it independently.
“It’s hard to tell,” a US analyst said. “But the PLA sometimes goes off on its own without telling anyone.”
The educated consensus holds that Beijing authorized the confrontation as it was conducted deliberately and timed to test the new US president.
Chinese government spokesmen said the US had intruded into Chinese territorial waters. When Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) was in Washington, all the White House said was that National Security Advisor James Jones had “raised the recent incident in the South China Sea.”
US military officers in the Pacific are concerned that the Chinese might miscalculate and overtly threaten or attack a US warship. As the captain would have the inherent duty to defend his ship, he could order his crew to fire at the Chinese. The consequences would be incalculable.
A White House press release said Obama “stressed the importance of raising the level and frequency of the US-China military-to-military dialogue in order to avoid future incidents.”
The Chinese broke off those meetings after the administration or former US president George W. Bush announced in October that the US would sell US$6.5 billion in weapons to Taiwan.
Pacific Command, led by Admiral Timothy Keating, has been trying to revive that dialogue, with staff officers saying the South China Sea incident makes such contacts imperative. The admiral met senior Chinese officers in Hong Kong last month, but to no avail. A Pentagon official, David Sedney, was in Beijing on a similar mission, but went home empty-handed.
At issue, moreover, is freedom of the seas, which is important to the US. China claims most of the South China Sea as territorial waters under its control. The US and most Asian countries disagree, as much of their economic lifelines pass through that sea.
China and the US agreed in 1998 to set up a consultative mechanism so that warships that encountered each other would have procedures to communicate, interpret the rules of the nautical road and avoid accidents.With this incident and others, such as a Chinese fighter plane buzzing a US intelligence aircraft in the same area in 2001, that agreement appears to have been thrown overboard.
Richard Halloran is a freelance writer in Hawaii.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
In an article published on this page on Tuesday, Kaohsiung-based journalist Julien Oeuillet wrote that “legions of people worldwide would care if a disaster occurred in South Korea or Japan, but the same people would not bat an eyelid if Taiwan disappeared.” That is quite a statement. We are constantly reading about the importance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), hailed in Taiwan as the nation’s “silicon shield” protecting it from hostile foreign forces such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and so crucial to the global supply chain for semiconductors that its loss would cost the global economy US$1
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
Sasha B. Chhabra’s column (“Michelle Yeoh should no longer be welcome,” March 26, page 8) lamented an Instagram post by renowned actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) about her recent visit to “Taipei, China.” It is Chhabra’s opinion that, in response to parroting Beijing’s propaganda about the status of Taiwan, Yeoh should be banned from entering this nation and her films cut off from funding by government-backed agencies, as well as disqualified from competing in the Golden Horse Awards. She and other celebrities, he wrote, must be made to understand “that there are consequences for their actions if they become political pawns of