HONG KONG -- As he left Beijing after 18 months as United States ambassador to China, Adm. Joseph Prueher, while hoping Sino-American relations were on an upswing, still warned that the continued detention of the U.S. Navy's EP-3E reconnaissance plane was having a "corrosive effect" on relations. "It's a reminder of a hard spot and we need to clean that up, and get on with things."
Nearly six weeks after a Chinese F-8 jet collided with the American EP-3E reconnaissance plane near Hainan, Sino-American relations continue to deteriorate as a result of that one incident alone. Far from quickly cleaning it up and getting on with other things, China continues to increase the corrosion effect. The U.S. reciprocates. Numerous other contentious issues also assist the drift toward an adversarial Sino-American relationship.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin, in Hong Kong on May 8 to give a keynote speech to a business conference, passed up a golden opportunity to get relations moving in a more positive direction. Of course, Jiang would have had to first reiterate China's official positions, thereby saving the face of all those Beijing officials now jumping on the anti-American bandwagon.