Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

China dismisses US proposal for military hot line



In talks, China dismisses US proposal for military hot line
No consensus on how forces should interact in Asia

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff / April 29, 2005

WASHINGTON -- China spurned a US proposal yesterday to set up an emergency hot line between their two militaries, and the two countries failed to agree on guidelines about how to avoid military confrontations in Asia, US officials said.

The discussions occurred during a policy meeting at the Pentagon between defense leaders from the two countries, according to the officials, who were involved in the closed-door negotiations and who spoke on condition of anonymity. The United States also pressed China to help negotiate an end to North Korea's nuclear weapons programs, they said.

The apparent impasse hinted at the mistrust between the two nations more than four years after Chinese fighter jets forced down a US Air Force spy plane and held its crew for 11 days -- sparking the first international crisis of the Bush administration.

Efforts to negotiate a Military Maritime Consultative Agreement, which would ensure the two sides can cooperate in case of sea and air emergencies, have remained elusive since the 2001 spy plane incident, in which a Chinese pilot who collided with the US EP-3 was killed. The two militaries severed ties for two years after the accident.

But the failure to reach agreement on a 'red phone" may best symbolize the divide between two powers, which are increasingly connected economically but still far apart on security issues, according defense officials and China specialists.

The military hot line was first proposed by the Pentagon in February 2004. The US and Chinese presidents set up a similar link in the late 1990s, and the US secretary of state and Chinese foreign minister established one last year.

The Pentagon maintains a direct line to the military headquarters of more than 30 nations. China is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council without a mechanism to quickly communicate with the US military in a crisis, something to which the Soviet Union agreed after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

'The Chinese strongly believe America is the enemy, America is the problem," said James Lilley, former US ambassador to China, who was not involved in the talks.

Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Washington could not be reached for comment about the meeting last night.

The Pentagon has recently warned of China's military buildup and questioned its intentions toward Taiwan, which Beijing views as a breakaway province.

The delegations yesterday were led by US Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith and General Xiong Guangkai, the deputy chief of the general staff of the People's Liberation Army. In 1998, Guangkai hinted at a nuclear attack on Los Angeles if the United States intervened in Taiwan.

The all-day meeting in a Pentagon conference room -- the third Defense Consultative Talks since 2001 -- was occasionally light-hearted but mainly 'businesslike," one American participant said.

'We talked about global security issues and encouraged China's positive cooperation on strategic issues like resolving the North Korean nuclear weapons program and the global war on terrorism," Lieutenant Commander Greg Hicks, a Pentagon spokesman, said last night.

Even before the EP-3 collision, the US and Chinese militaries had sought to iron out guidelines for how their forces would interact in the region.China maintains that American forces must remain at least 200 nautical miles from its shores even though international law stipulates only an exclusive economic zone of 12 nautical miles, according to officials participating in the talks.

Bryan Bender can be reached at [e-mail].