The International Action Center denounces U.S. spy-plane flights in and near Chinese air space and U.S. threats since the plane landed in China as acts of aggression and blatant attacks on Chinese sovereignty.
The IAC, as a leading organization in the U.S. anti-war movement, calls on that movement to be on the alert for further dangerous U.S. moves against China and be prepared to raise its voice in protest against them.
Instead of offering an immediate apology for spying in Chinese coastal waters and most likely causing the death of a Chinese pilot and the loss of a Chinese jet, the U.S. government has gone on the offensive. The Bush administration has demanded the unconditional release of the spies and the equipment.
This plane was flying 7,000 miles off the coast of the continental United States when it collided with a Chinese jet. What would be the response to a Chinese spy plane conducting electronic surveillance and reconnaissance off the coast of Long Island or Virginia? Washington allows no country to conduct such flights off the U.S. coast. But the Pentagon regularly conducts such spy missions against other countries.
The People's Republic of China has every right to protect its borders under those circumstances. The U.S. government says the Chinese cannot board the spy plane, which it considers U.S. territory. Yet when a Cuban defector flew an advanced MiG plane to Florida, even though it was not engaged in spying, U.S. specialists disassembled the plane.
This latest incident is no isolated event, but is part of a chain of growing U.S. open hostility toward China. It must be viewed in light of U.S. threats to arm the Taiwan regime with a new generation of high-tech weapons, in violation of past agreements with China.
Another link in this chain was the attempt to make a scapegoat of the Chinese-American scientist, Wen Ho Lee, for alleged spying on behalf of Peoples China. Another was the calculated U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia. Another is the constant maneuvers of the U.S. 7th Fleet of aircraft carriers, jet bombers and destroyers in the Straits of Taiwan.
All these aggressive acts feed into the Pentagon campaign to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a so-called Missile Defense Shield. Most governments recognize the MDS as being not a defensive weapon at all.
They oppose it as a highly threatening military escalation. It is an enormously expensive program built to allow a nuclear first-strike, which will only benefit the corporate merchants of death.
Since the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 U.S. governments have varied their strategy with regard to China.
Sometimes they used open military hostility, but for the past period they focused on economic contacts. But these strategies were all aimed at trying to penetrate the Chinese economy and gain control of it.
Now this policy may be shifting back to military hostility in order to insure the super profits of the giant military contractors who benefit from the Missile Defense Shield and the new weapons for Taiwan.
A sign of possible change in this direction is the new U.S. ambassador to China, retired Admiral Joseph Prueher, a former U.S. commander in the Pacific. For the past 100 years the Navy has always been the U.S.'s "Big Stick" in the Pacific, imposing U.S. power up and down the coast of Asia. The IAC calls on the anti-war movement in the U.S. to mobilize to demand that the Pentagon end its spy flights in the Pacific, that Washington apologize for the death of the Chinese pilot and send no new weapons to Taiwan.
International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
