U.S.-China Naval Scuffle: Relax Everything is Fine. Or Is It?

The incident in which a “civilian U.S. survey ship” (actually by all accounts a vessel designed specifically to enhance submarine tracking) was harassed by five Chinese vessels 75 miles off Hainan Island (where China happens to have a huge submarine base) has been dismissed smoothed over by top leaders meeting in Washington. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and her Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi both said (see here) that they would work to put the incident behind them, see it wasn’t repeated in the future etc. etc. Given that the U.S. Navy ship likely was doing some sort of submarine tracking and the Chinese find this unacceptable, it is, in fact, highly likely this will happen again. Remember the 2001 P-3 incident was about surveillance in the same area and almost exactly the same distance from Hainan. Arguments about whether the plane had the right to be there doing what it was doing revolved around the same issues of exclusive economic zones and the Law of the Sea Treaty (which the U.S. has not signed, by the way; note that when the U.S. claimed its own 200-mile EEZ it was psecifically stated that other countries copntinued to have full rights of passage and wouldn’t be interfered with in any way). Yang Jiechi is actually a fairly weak figure in Beijing’s grand bureaucratic scheme of things and is in Washington basically to finalize preparations for the upcoming Obama-Hu summit. Naturally he’d make soothing noises. But listen to the unvarnished reaction of Chinese navy officers here  and you have to wonder, as I always have, exactly tro what extent they can –or would– act independently, particularly when it comes to what are seen as relatively insignificant skirmishes like this.  You alos have to wonder whether the next time this sort of thing happens it might  go badly if the Chinese military on the ground take this sort of aggressive talk as permission bite as hard as their seniors are barking.