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Eleven days after the emergency landing of a U.S. Navy EP-3 spy plane on China’s Hainan Island, Chinese officials announced yesterday they will continue to hold the crew as political prisoners until a formal White House apology is offered.
“The United States must take a more cooperative and pragmatic attitude, it must take responsibility and it must apologize,” Sun Yuxi, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Monday to AP sources. He emphasized that the plane landed in restricted territory against international sanctions.
The Navy EP-3 was clipped by a Chinese F-8 over the South China Sea on April 1, causing the death of a Chinese pilot and the crew of the American plane to plunge 8,000 feet.
Pentagon officials claim the collision came on the Chinese pilot’s third aggressive pass of the Navy plane and that the Chinese pilot had approached at a 45-degree angle twice before, passing as close as three to five feet from the American plane.
After the Chinese plane exploded and fell into the ocean, the U.S. plane made its way 100 kilometers north, to a nearby Chinese air force base at Lingshui on Hainan Island’s South Coast. There, although the crew managed to land the damaged plane, they were immediately detained and taken to the island’s capital, Haikou.
In a nationally broadcast press conference from the White House, Navy and Pentagon officials told reporters that a group of U.S. diplomats, led by Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock, had met with the crew for the fifth time Tuesday. The crew is supposedly in good health and receiving regular exercise and food.
Pentagon sources have said to Allpolitics.com that as the standoff nears the two-week mark, neither American or Chinese officials are ready to make any concessions. Although Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed his sympathy for the family of Wang Wei, the dead Chinese pilot, President George W. Bush has repeatedly refused to accept responsibility for the crash, saying the crew of the American jet had done nothing wrong.
Meanwhile, last week Ruan Guoqin, Wei’s widow, wrote a letter to President Bush expressing her indignation for his refusal to apologize.
“What is incredible is you and your government’s apathetic attitude toward my husband’s life,” wrote Guoqin, according to the Chinese Xinhua news agency. “In this serious matter with irrefutable facts and the responsibility completely resting on the U.S. side, you are too cowardly to voice an apology and have been trying to shirk your responsibility repeatedly and defame my husband groundlessly. Can this be the human rights and humanism that you have been talking about everyday?”
In a state-run communist party newspaper, the government of Vietnam joined Chinese officials Sunday, lashing out at the White House’s alleged indifference to the loss of human life. The Vietnam government also cited Bush’s treatment of the incident as a platform for human rights violations.
“[The American plane] trespassed and landed illegally at a Chinese airport,” the article reads. “Only the American government, especially the new government under Mr. George W. Bush’s leadership in the past 100 days could act so violently… the United States (or more precisely, the U.S. government) should be understood as having a full right to do what it wants – it’s their right to enter and to spy. No one can touch them.”
According to AP reports, China has rejected the third United State’s draft of a letter designed to end the standoff. A fourth letter is being drafted and will soon be sent to the Chinese government.
“Every day that goes by increases the potential that our relations with China could be damaged,” Bush admitted to Reuters.com before a meeting of his Cabinet Monday.
