Hagel Tours Chinese Aircraft Carrier

Hagel Tours Chinese Aircraft Carrier

QINGDAO, China — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel finally got a long-awaited look at China’s only aircraft carrier on Monday, taking a two-hour tour of the vessel at a naval base near this port city that Pentagon officials said was the first such visit by a foreign defense official.

Accompanied by a handful of aides, Mr. Hagel toured the medical facilities, living quarters and flight control station of the Liaoning aircraft carrier in Qingdao, and took a walking tour of the flight deck to see launch stations and other apparatus devoted to getting China’s fighter jets into the air.

Mr. Hagel and other Obama administration officials have repeatedly called on the Chinese government to demonstrate more transparency, particularly in its military, whose budget has increased significantly even as the United States cuts back on defense spending.

After Qingdao, Mr. Hagel flew to Beijing, where he was scheduled to hold talks on Tuesday with his Chinese counterpart and to deliver a speech at China’s National Defense University.

Military officials accompanying Mr. Hagel said the visit to the ship was a big step in the fledgling military relationship between the United States and China, two global powers that have been increasingly at loggerheads over what many American officials view as Beijing’s aggressive posture toward Japan and other neighbors.

But Mr. Hagel’s aides said that even if they received only a limited look at China’s maritime capability, they viewed the visit to the ship as one bright light in what could be an otherwise contentious trip.

“It’s always good to get aboard a ship,” Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon press spokesman, told reporters after the tour. “It feels the same, it smells the same.”

Defense officials said that the Chinese carrier is significantly less advanced than its American counterparts, but they added that it can carry out the main function of an aircraft carrier — receiving and launching fighter planes.

Mr. Hagel arrived on Monday in Qingdao, where China will host the Western Pacific Naval Symposium this month, a meeting of countries that border the Pacific Ocean that is held every two years. The W.P.N.S., as it is known in naval circles, counts among its members the United States, Australia, Chile, Canada and a number of Asian countries, including China and Japan.

Often at such meetings, the host country organizes an international fleet review at which visiting countries can show off their ships and hardware. It can be an eye-popping display of warships, destroyers and guided-missile cruisers. In 2008, when South Korea hosted the symposium, the United States sent the aircraft carrier George Washington, the guided missile cruiser Cowpens and the destroyer John S. McCain to take part.

For this year’s fleet review, China invited all the countries in the symposium to take part — except Japan.

“It is so totally high school,” a senior American defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

On the eve of Mr. Hagel’s trip, Pentagon officials announced that if Japan could not take part in the review, then the United States would not either. The United States will attend the meeting, the Pentagon said, but no American ships will participate in the fleet review.

“As of this moment, there is no intent to send a U.S. ship to participate,” a Pentagon official said in a carefully worded statement. “W.P.N.S. is an important multilateral venue that promotes collaboration among navies in an inclusive, cooperative and constructive forum.”

The United States has been witness to disputes between Japan and China for decades, but things have seemed to be coming to a boil in recent months. Late last year, China set off a trans-Pacific uproar after it declared that an “air defense identification zone” gave it the right to identify and possibly take military action against aircraft near uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that are known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands and in China as the Diaoyu Islands. Japan controls and administers the islands, but China claims them.

Japan refuses to recognize China’s claim, and the United States has defied China by sending military planes into the zone unannounced.

In February, Capt. James Fanell, the director of intelligence and information operations with the United States Pacific Fleet, said that China was training its forces to be capable of carrying out a “short, sharp” war with Japan in the East China Sea. Other American officials noted with increasing concern the buildup of China’s military and what they called a lack of transparency among its leaders.

During a news conference on Sunday with Japan’s minister of defense, Itsunori Onodera, Mr. Hagel sounded exasperated with China.

“I will be talking with the Chinese about its respect for their neighbors,” he said, urging the country to use its “great power” in a responsible way. “You cannot go around the world and redefine boundaries and violate territorial integrity and the sovereignty of nations by force, coercion or intimidation, whether it’s in small islands in the Pacific or in large nations in Europe,” he said.

Pentagon officials said Mr. Hagel had no official plans to raise the fleet review issue during his talks with officials in China, but they acknowledged that the issue might come up anyway.

Japan’s occupation of China during World War II is part of the reason Beijing does not like the idea of Japanese ships’ taking part in the fleet review, Asia experts said. But they also expressed alarm over China’s recent worldwide public relations campaign to increase criticism of Japan. Dozens of Chinese ambassadors have criticized Japan in letters written to global newspapers; in one, China’s ambassador to Britain compared Japan to the evil Lord Voldemort of “Harry Potter” fame. The shunning of Japan’s fleet, analysts said, is just the latest in the anti-Japan campaign underway in China.

In Tokyo, the American decision to shun the fleet review in solidarity with Japan was greeted warmly, and analysts said it could help allay growing concerns in Japan about whether the United States would stand alongside Tokyo in facing China’s rising military might.

“This is a very positive step toward addressing Japanese concerns,” said Narushige Michishita, the director of security and international studies at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Japan. “The decision is being seen here as a signal from the U.S. that its deterrence still has credibility.”

But “this sort of tit for tat shows how the U.S. is being drawn into the escalating row over history that China and Japan have been engaging in,” said Andrew Oros, a specialist on East Asia and an associate professor of political science at Washington College in Maryland. “It may seem irrelevant, but it exposes how surface-level issues illustrate serious underlying problems between the two largest economies in Asia, and the second- and third-largest economies in the world.”

NYT