Word: hainan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...President Bush, it must be said, looked awkward and uncertain those first two days of the Hainan standoff. He talked tough, or tough-ish, but that appeared to only ratchet up the rhetoric from Beijing. He'd previously signaled his intention to play hardball with China, and had hoped to downgrade the central role the Middle Kingdom had played in the Clinton administration's Asia policy. Suddenly, here were the Chinese in his face, testing his resolve. And with the immediate fate of 24 U.S. personnel - and a relationship of profound geopolitical and economic consequence - at stake, there was precious...
...weeks preceding Hainan, Powell had been under pressure from Bush administration hard-liners inclined to see him as an incorrigible dove whose commonsense policies on questions such as Iraq sanctions and dialogue with North Korea were undercutting their saber-rattling. But once the administration was plunged without warning into a situation that threatened to escalate into a crisis, he was the man of the hour...
...Jiang Zemin and the modernizers in Beijing who have staked their careers on opening China to the West and integrating it into the world economy had no interest in prolonging a confrontation that could only imperil their achievements. But in the atmosphere of hostility generated in China by the Hainan incident, there was a danger that those modernizers could be eclipsed by hard-liners in Beijing hoping to slow, or even turn back, the clock. A solution depended on Jiang and his allies' being given political cover to back down without appearing to lose face...
...tomato, I say toh-mah-toh, let's call the whole thing off..." Indeed, if China and the U.S. spoke the same language, the job of U.S. and Chinese diplomats negotiating the text of a letter from Washington that would allow them to end the Hainan standoff would have been a lot more difficult. And, of course, Beijing's monopoly of control over the Chinese media may have proved extremely useful in developing traction for a diplomatic solution in which one side needed to convince its public that it had received an apology, while the other side had to gesture...
...other side. Instead, the U.S. twice used the English phrase "very sorry," first for the loss of the Chinese pilot, Wang Wei, and second for the failure of the pilot of the stricken EP-3 spy plane to seek verbal clearance for entering Chinese airspace and landing at Hainan...