Posted on: Thursday, April 12, 2001

Spy plane crew release a victory for diplomats

With the 24 men and women of the U.S. Navy EP-3 crew safely back on U.S. soil, that sigh of relief you hear is not only from their family, friends and colleagues.

It is from, among others, the thousands of business people, American and Chinese alike, who wondered if billions of dollars of trade and investment would be halted by the incident.

And it emanates from China's neighbors, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, worried about the effect on their region if the spy plane incident were to spiral beyond words.

The release of the crew is a victory for diplomats — careful wordsmiths who were able to craft a way out, without any loss of face, for both sides. The incident would have been much shorter and less serious if the project had been turned over to their care earlier.

Instead, politicians and military figures for both sides talked themselves out onto limbs from which dignified retreat was becoming increasingly difficult. It didn't take long before the leaders of both countries realized that both sides stood to lose far more from a prolonged dispute than any possible gain from the no-win incident itself.

The way the American side describes it now, the U.S. expression of sorrow, in a letter that Ambassador Joseph Prueher handed to China's foreign minister in Beijing, pointedly omitted use of the word apology — despite China's demand for an apology.

But the fact that the letter was in English — not an accident — allowed the Chinese side promptly to release a translation that justified their government's claim that they have received an apology, and thus have achieved a "victory."

In a statement broadcast to the nation, the Washington Post reports, the Chinese Foreign Ministry translated the English "very sorry" into "shenbiao qianyi," an expression of sincere apology or regret that Chinese linguists say involves an acknowledgement of error and an acceptance of responsibility.

But a copy of the letter in Chinese released by the U.S. Embassy did not use that term, saying instead that the United States expressed "fei-chang wanxi," or extreme sympathy, to the Chinese people and the family of the missing pilot. It also said the United States was "feichang baoqian," or extremely sorry, that the Navy plane landed without permission.

So the American crew is free and the Chinese are claiming to have exacted an apology. Everyone wins, no one loses. The craft of diplomacy has extricated both sides from a predicament that cooler heads should have minimized in the first place.