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Mixing It Up in China
By Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret of Freedom Institute
25/04/2001
The Number One story of the month has to be the mid-air crash of an American reconnaissance plane and a Chinese fighter. The pilot of the fighter plane died and the 24 crewmembers of the American plane were detained - while politicians postured and diplomats pondered the subtleties of the numerous words for "apology" in Mandarin. The key item of interest is the lack of cultural sensitivity demonstrated by the American administration in the early part of the crisis.
American commentators, following the cue of the Bush Administration, expressed annoyance and even outrage at the Chinese demands for an apology as a condition for the release of the Americans in detention. They argued that the pilot's death was the consequence of his own aggressive flying. The American crew had sent out the standard "mayday" signal for help. It was not its fault that the Chinese failed to respond and grant permission for the crippled plane to land. Taking hostages for an apology? This made no sense to the American pundits. A diplomat was anonymously quoted as saying, "The Chinese leadership appears to me to have chosen a path of confrontation when there were other paths available to them to try to solve this issue… I think they've gained some short-term advantages, but I don't think they've gained big ones in the long haul" (Eckert, 2000).
The pundits failed to take into account the importance of saving face in oriental culture, and they failed to remember that the Chinese had already lost face once when the Americans bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. In 1999, NATO used our "precision-guided weapons" (which the United States is so fond of praising) to bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade "by mistake." The excuses offered by the American-led forces kept changing. At first, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea maintained that the "pilots had mistaken the building for a legitimate military target and then hit it with precision-guided weapons" (Head, 1999). Only hours later, "Major General Walter Jertz said the error had been made in the initial target selection process" (Head, 1999).
Although "Chinese officials accused the U.S. of striking the embassy to punish China for representing Yugoslav diplomatic interests in Washington" (Head, 1999), their response to this shocking bombing was relatively low profile. It certainly didn't compare with the United States' response to the bombing of its embassies in Africa. The Chinese people, however, were not so passive - they demonstrated in the streets and attacked the U.S. embassy buildings. While the United States criticized the Chinese government for failing to keep its people in check, the Chinese people began to fault their government for its passivity in the face of the violence, causing a loss of face that made it impossible for them to be passive after this plane crash - less than two years later. American politicians, extremely sensitive themselves to popular opinion in their own districts, erroneously think that authoritarian regimes are completely oblivious to popular opinion. This is not the case.
Even apart from cultural differences regarding the importance of "saving face," the claim that no apology was due because the Chinese pilot was buzzing the American reconnaissance plane is absurd. We can only imagine how the administration would react if a Chinese (or Iraqi!) reconnaissance plane was flying just off the coast of the United States. Buzzing by American pilots would be the least of their problems!
The lesson for Muslims from this recent history is that we cannot expect the American government to be any more sensitive to Islamic sensibilities than they were in this case - unless we Muslims in the United States make it happen through intensive education of policymakers. Nations that take the trouble to understand the culture of other nations will communicate more effectively, and have fewer understandings. In the end, the Bush Administration did apologize, saying it was "very sorry" that the Chinese pilot had died and that the plane had entered Chinese airspace without verbal clearance. The American crew, which had been held for eleven days, was released shortly thereafter.
References
Eckert, Paul. "U.S.: Chinese Fighter Pilot Caused Mid-Air Crash." 2000.
Head, Mike. "How Could the Bombing of the Chinese Embassy Have Been a Mistake?"
May 10, 1999. World Socialist Web Site.
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