Hagel Tours Chinese Aircraft Carrier
By HELENE COOPER
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is visiting China amid tit-for-tat
maneuvering and territorial disputes between China and its East Asian
neighbors.
QINGDAO,
China — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel finally got a long-awaited look
at China’s only aircraft carrier on Monday, taking a two-hour tour of
the vessel at a naval base near this port city that Pentagon officials
said was the first such visit by a foreign defense official.
Accompanied
by a handful of aides, Mr. Hagel toured the medical facilities, living
quarters and flight control station of the Liaoning aircraft carrier in
Qingdao, and took a walking tour of the flight deck to see launch
stations and other apparatus devoted to getting China’s fighter jets
into the air.
Mr.
Hagel and other Obama administration officials have repeatedly called
on the Chinese government to demonstrate more transparency, particularly
in its military, whose budget has increased significantly even as the
United States cuts back on defense spending.
After
Qingdao, Mr. Hagel flew to Beijing, where he was scheduled to hold
talks on Tuesday with his Chinese counterpart and to deliver a speech at
China’s National Defense University.
Military
officials accompanying Mr. Hagel said the visit to the ship was a big
step in the fledgling military relationship between the United States
and China, two global powers that have been increasingly at loggerheads
over what many American officials view as Beijing’s aggressive posture
toward Japan and other neighbors.
But
Mr. Hagel’s aides said that even if they received only a limited look
at China’s maritime capability, they viewed the visit to the ship as one
bright light in what could be an otherwise contentious trip.
“It’s
always good to get aboard a ship,” Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the
Pentagon press spokesman, told reporters after the tour. “It feels the
same, it smells the same.”
Defense
officials said that the Chinese carrier is significantly less advanced
than its American counterparts, but they added that it can carry out the
main function of an aircraft carrier — receiving and launching fighter
planes.
Mr.
Hagel arrived on Monday in Qingdao, where China will host the Western
Pacific Naval Symposium this month, a meeting of countries that border
the Pacific Ocean that is held every two years. The W.P.N.S., as it is
known in naval circles, counts among its members the United States,
Australia, Chile, Canada and a number of Asian countries, including
China and Japan.
Often
at such meetings, the host country organizes an international fleet
review at which visiting countries can show off their ships and
hardware. It can be an eye-popping display of warships, destroyers and
guided-missile cruisers. In 2008, when South Korea hosted the symposium,
the United States sent the aircraft carrier George Washington, the
guided missile cruiser Cowpens and the destroyer John S. McCain to take
part.
For this year’s fleet review, China invited all the countries in the symposium to take part — except Japan.
“It
is so totally high school,” a senior American defense official said,
speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to
discuss the issue publicly.
On
the eve of Mr. Hagel’s trip, Pentagon officials announced that if Japan
could not take part in the review, then the United States would not
either. The United States will attend the meeting, the Pentagon said,
but no American ships will participate in the fleet review.
“As
of this moment, there is no intent to send a U.S. ship to participate,”
a Pentagon official said in a carefully worded statement. “W.P.N.S. is
an important multilateral venue that promotes collaboration among navies
in an inclusive, cooperative and constructive forum.”
The
United States has been witness to disputes between Japan and China for
decades, but things have seemed to be coming to a boil in recent months.
Late last year, China set off a trans-Pacific uproar
after it declared that an “air defense identification zone” gave it the
right to identify and possibly take military action against aircraft
near uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that are known in Japan
as the Senkaku Islands and in China as the Diaoyu Islands. Japan
controls and administers the islands, but China claims them.
Japan
refuses to recognize China’s claim, and the United States has defied
China by sending military planes into the zone unannounced.
In
February, Capt. James Fanell, the director of intelligence and
information operations with the United States Pacific Fleet, said that
China was training its forces to be capable of carrying out a “short,
sharp” war with Japan in the East China Sea. Other American officials
noted with increasing concern the buildup of China’s military and what
they called a lack of transparency among its leaders.
During a news conference on Sunday with Japan’s minister of defense, Itsunori Onodera, Mr. Hagel sounded exasperated with China.
“I
will be talking with the Chinese about its respect for their
neighbors,” he said, urging the country to use its “great power” in a
responsible way. “You cannot go around the world and redefine boundaries
and violate territorial integrity and the sovereignty of nations by
force, coercion or intimidation, whether it’s in small islands in the
Pacific or in large nations in Europe,” he said.
Pentagon
officials said Mr. Hagel had no official plans to raise the fleet
review issue during his talks with officials in China, but they
acknowledged that the issue might come up anyway.
Japan’s
occupation of China during World War II is part of the reason Beijing
does not like the idea of Japanese ships’ taking part in the fleet
review, Asia experts said. But they also expressed alarm over China’s
recent worldwide public relations campaign
to increase criticism of Japan. Dozens of Chinese ambassadors have
criticized Japan in letters written to global newspapers; in one,
China’s ambassador to Britain compared Japan to the evil Lord Voldemort
of “Harry Potter” fame. The shunning of Japan’s fleet, analysts said, is
just the latest in the anti-Japan campaign underway in China.
In
Tokyo, the American decision to shun the fleet review in solidarity
with Japan was greeted warmly, and analysts said it could help allay
growing concerns in Japan about whether the United States would stand
alongside Tokyo in facing China’s rising military might.
“This
is a very positive step toward addressing Japanese concerns,” said
Narushige Michishita, the director of security and international studies
at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Japan. “The
decision is being seen here as a signal from the U.S. that its
deterrence still has credibility.”
But
“this sort of tit for tat shows how the U.S. is being drawn into the
escalating row over history that China and Japan have been engaging in,”
said Andrew Oros, a specialist on East Asia and an associate professor
of political science at Washington College in Maryland. “It may seem
irrelevant, but it exposes how surface-level issues illustrate serious
underlying problems between the two largest economies in Asia, and the
second- and third-largest economies in the world.”
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
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