When America and China Collided

On a sunny Sunday morning in April 2001, an American EP-3E Aries II surveillance aircraft was flying at 22,500 feet over international waters in the South China Sea when two Chinese F-8 fighter jets appeared. One of the F-8s, piloted by a lieutenant commander named Wang Wei, flew within ten feet of the spy plane’s left wing and saluted the crew before dropping back 100 feet.

Wang then approached a second time, flying within five feet and seeming to shout something at the American pilots. On a third advance, he got closer still—close enough to get pulled into one of the EP-3E’s propellers. The Chinese F-8 was sliced in half, killing Wang, whom state media would later refer to as a “revolutionary martyr.”

Shrapnel from the collision went flying in every direction, amputating the EP-3E’s nose, rupturing a wing tip, and damaging two of the four engines. The plane plummeted 8,000 feet in 30 seconds before the pilot, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Shane Osborn, managed to stabilize it.

The 24-member American crew had been halfway through a ten-hour routine reconnaissance mission when the crash occurred. Given the state of the aircraft, they could not make it back to the U.S. base in Okinawa, Japan. After briefly considering a risky water landing, Osborn chose to guide the plane 70 miles southwest to a Chinese air base on Hainan Island.

Knowing they were heading for hostile territory, the crew spent the next 40 minutes frantically trying to destroy sensitive material. Woefully unprepared for such a scenario, they futilely stomped on laptops, poured hot coffee over hard drives, and tore documents with their hands. An axe designed to destroy equipment was too blunt to use. Osborn issued a mayday call, which went unanswered. Then he issued another, and another. But there was no reply from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Hainan. With no option but to land uninvited, Osborn steered the plane toward a runway, where Chinese military trucks and some two dozen soldiers cradling AK-47s were already waiting.

The American crew members were relieved to have survived the collision, but their fate now lay in the hands of Chinese authorities. Osborn called the Pacific Fleet headquarters to report their location. Then, following orders from the soldiers, he and his compatriots exited the plane.

The Americans were bused to accommodations on the military base, where they would be interrogated over the coming days. No one in Washington wanted to inflame the situation by saying the Americans were essentially captives. Instead, the State Department made references in statements to the press to the crew being temporarily “held,” or “detained,” and assured the American public that the U.S. military attaché in Beijing, Neal Sealock, had been granted access to the Americans.

Another collision at some point is almost certain, but a crisis need not spiral into total war.

In central Beijing, it was just past 9:00 AM when the U.S. ambassador to China, Joseph Prueher, got word of the incident from Pacific Fleet headquarters in Hawaii, where he had previously served as commander. At the time, he was walking with his wife after having attended church. He rushed back to the embassy to begin negotiations with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Chinese claimed that the lumbering EP-3E had hit the fast-flying jet. Prueher, who had been a navy pilot, explained that the laws of aerodynamics did not work that way; a slower moving plane like the EP-3E could not deliberately collide with a jet. But he did not explicitly blame the People’s Liberation Army for the collision.

Prueher, working closely with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, devised a way to deflate the tensions. They decided to make two polite apologies in a dispatch that came to be known as “the letter of the two sorries.” Washington said it was sorry for the death of the Chinese pilot and sorry that the American crew had landed in China without receiving formal permission. The ambassador’s main counterpart, Zhou Wenzhong, an English-speaking senior Chinese diplomat who would later become China’s ambassador in Washington, smoothed the way for a positive reaction to the letter from his superiors, including President Jiang Zemin.

After 11 days, Beijing released the American crew, which flew out of Hainan Island for Guam on a commercial airliner, as stipulated by the Chinese, who insisted that no U.S. military aircraft enter China. The United States sent technicians from Lockheed Martin, the aircraft’s manufacturer, to Hainan to dismantle the EP-3E; the pieces were then delivered, by way of a cargo plane, to an air base in Marietta, Georgia. How much intelligence was lost and passed into Chinese hands has never been specified. U.S. Navy investigators have deemed the losses “medium-to-low” in severity.

Today, such a smooth, swift outcome would be almost impossible. The Chinese military is many times more powerful now. Its navy has advanced hypersonic missiles and more ships than the U.S. Navy. And this May, Beijing passed a law authorizing its coast guard to detain foreign vessels and persons in “waters under Chinese jurisdiction”—which, according to the Chinese, includes almost the entire South China Sea. Another collision at some point is almost certain. But a crisis need not spiral into total war. To avoid a catastrophic escalation, Washington and Beijing must enter into serious discussions now to forestall misunderstanding.

TROUBLED WATERS AHEAD

In 2001, Beijing had more reasons to be conciliatory than it does now. China was on the cusp of joining the World Trade Organization and was close to winning its bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics; it did not want to squander these opportunities by taking an aggressive posture toward Washington. For about dozen years after the EP-3E incident, the South China Sea was relatively quiet, as Beijing capitalized on Washington’s distraction with the Iraq War to secure economic and political gains in Southeast Asia.

But in the past decade, China has become far more confident and militarily capable—and the nature of the country’s leadership has changed. It is almost unthinkable that President Xi Jinping would pursue good-faith negotiations, as Jiang did, to resolve a similar incident today. Xi has made it clear that the Indo-Pacific region is China’s home turf, where it aims to be the unchallenged military, economic, and political power. In the South China Sea, the Chinese have built seven artificial islands that serve as bases, complete with airstrips and hangars, for Chinese ships and aircraft.

President Joe Biden got a taste of Xi’s attitude when they first met in 2011, at a time when both men were serving as vice presidents. The Obama administration had sent Biden to China knowing that Xi had been tapped as China’s next leader. The two men did a photo op on a basketball court in Chengdu and went for a stroll. Two years later, during a visit to Beijing, Biden told a room full of American journalists about the contents of that first meeting. It was clear from Biden’s account that Xi’s priority was national security.

Xi had told Biden that if a similar collision happened between a U.S. surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet, there would not be a happy ending. The United States, he warned, had to stop sending spy planes over Chinese waters.

Biden countered that the U.S. planes were in international waters and had every right to be there, adding that if China were more open about its military operations, the United States would not be eavesdropping so much.

“If you don’t stop the flights, we will have to send our planes to chase the American planes away,” Xi said. Biden reminded Xi that the risks of such a policy were high: Chinese pilots were not skilled enough to avoid a repeat of the 2001 collision.

Today, the risks of a collision in the air over the South China Sea are many times higher than they were in 2001. Over the last two years, Chinese jets have come dangerously close to U.S. and allied aircraft nearly 300 times. The Pentagon views these reckless maneuvers as part of a centrally directed campaign of coercion designed to stop the United States from flying over international waterways. Planes from Australia and Canada flying on routine sanctions-enforcement flights against North Korea have also been tailed by Chinese military jets.

Critically, Chinese military planes routinely patrol the Taiwan Strait, the epicenter of competition between China and the United States. The regular presence of Chinese aircraft inside Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, which requires Chinese planes to identify themselves, raises the risks of an accident. When Chinese planes cross the zone, the Taiwanese military has only minutes to assess China’s intentions, creating a dangerous situation that could result in an accident.

PARLEY OR PERISH

If there were a repeat of the 2001 collision today, China would likely use the incident to bolster its claims over the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Ample scope remains for misunderstanding between the U.S. and Chinese militaries, which only resumed talks earlier this year, ending a freeze that followed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. Crucially, the two militaries have no hotline to contact each other in an emergency.

In 2014, Beijing and Washington had adopted a memorandum of understanding that set down rules of behavior for ships and aircraft of the two sides. But former American officials involved in the document now scoff at it. Both sides have routinely flouted the rules and have referred to them only when it has been politically expedient to do so.

Given the tense relationship and the stakes, it is highly unlikely that a damaged American aircraft, especially a spy plane loaded with sensitive information, would land on Chinese territory. “I don’t think we’ll see someone from our side landing on their territory,” Charlie Brown, a former U.S. Navy officer, told me. Instead, a U.S. plane would most likely crash-land on water. The crew would eject before impact, if possible, or the plane would ditch in the water with the crew on board.

Ample scope remains for misunderstanding between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.

With a U.S. military aircraft ditched in the South China Sea, a race to the crash site would unfold. China has more ships in the region than does the United States, and Chinese forces would likely reach the scene of the collision first; they would also block and ram U.S. vessels to make it impossible for them to reach the site. “Instead of turning this into a rescue operation, the Chinese could turn it into a sovereignty operation,” Scott Swift, the former commanding officer of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, told me. The odds of a direct military confrontation would grow higher with each passing minute.

Some China observers believe the U.S. Navy should scale back its provocative reconnaissance missions near the Chinese coast, especially since much of the intelligence collected during the flights can now be gathered by other means, such as satellites. But that is an unlikely prospect, in part because the U.S. Navy is not eager to accept a diminished role for its highly trained pilots and specialized aircraft.

Still, the United States is aware that China now has the upper hand in the South China Sea. Now more than ever, Washington needs to press Beijing for substantive military-to-military talks to ensure that a crisis in the South China Sea does not escalate into conflict.