Bush's Big Test: Saving Face

Everyone had a job to do onboard the dying Navy reconnaissance plane when it began to fall out of the sky. The two pilots up front were trying to save the aircraft, while the other 22 crew members in back were trying to destroy what was inside it. Two Chinese F-8 fighters had been tracking the plane closely, too closely, for 10 minutes. The U.S. flyers even recognized one of the pilots, Wang Wei, a notorious hotdogger who one time flew so close to an American plane that he could be seen holding up his e-mail address on a piece of paper. It was Wang's plane that clipped the EP-3E's left wing, slashed one of its four propellers into pieces and smashed off the plane's nose before spiraling into the South China Sea. Rocked by the collision, the vibrating turboprop plunged 8,000 ft. before pilot Shane Osborn regained control. "Mayday! Mayday!" a flyer called into the radio, as the pilots shut down the most damaged engine, and the plane bucked and shuddered in indignation. There was no chance of making it 1,300 miles back to Okinawa or even to the Philippines. The closest airstrip was on the resort island of Hainan, known in Chinese legend as the "end of the world," where the sky and sea meet to form a perfect haven. It is also home to many Chinese military bases, the kind of place where honeymooners sit on the beach and watch the submarines surface offshore, the fighter jets buzz overhead. You couldn't pick a worse place to land one of the most highly classified planes the U.S. has ever built, full of secrets about how we gather secrets--if the pilots could manage to land at all.

While they wrestled the crippled plane, the crew had a familiar drill to follow: the "classified destruction plan," which assigns each crew member a sensitive part of the plane to demolish. Some of the steps--erasing computer hard drives that recorded the day's mission--were manageable even if the plane's violent rocking kept the crew strapped into their seats. But the most sophisticated eavesdropping gear was supposed to be destroyed in order to be saved, smashed with hammers and hatchets or stuffed into weighted bags and dumped out of the plane's cargo doors. Once the plane managed to land safely, there could be one last chance to cram secret papers into special containers and then detonate grenades inside them.

By the time news of the harrowing collision became public, a similar drill was being repeated in Washington and Beijing. Some on the front lines of the U.S.-China relationship were trying to save it, while others in the back seemed intent on blowing it up. Neither country was able to manage a clear response for days. In both, there are hard-liners, who seem to miss the days of cold war chest thumping, arrayed against accommodationists, who value, among other peace dividends, the $116 billion in annual trade. It was in the interest of both to let the other side know there were divisions within their ranks. That's the nature of the game, played this round by George W. Bush, a blunt-spoken Westerner whose father was once a special envoy to China, and President Jiang Zemin, an aging autocrat who staked his authority on building a better relationship with the West, only to come under fire at home for going too far. In a test of pride and power, two Presidents fought to control the weapons of diplomacy, the tiny spaces between a concern, a regret and an apology.