China's public statements maintain that they're sending the U.S. personnel home because the U.S. met China's demands for an apology. Obviously the U.S. fell far short of the apology China had demanded, but the Chinese media will withhold some information and spin the rest to its liking in order to convince their own people that the U.S. met their demands. Colin Powell - TIME Person of the Week. Why We Chose Him - For bringing home 24 Americans from Hainan and helping his boss out of a bind while avoiding turning an incident into a crisis, Secretary of State Colin Powell is our Person of the Week. James Poniewozik asks whether journalists should be expected to follow the same rules.
Diplomatic crises are a great big fun-filled pi ata for a media critic.
And diplomacy, when it boils down to it, is mostly semantics. It's no accident that former Nixon speechwriter and foreign-policy maven William Safire is now a usage columnist for the New York Times. The Guardian US told to target China - A historic shift of emphasis in United States military deployment from Europe to Asia, with China supplanting Russia as America's principal foe, is at the heart of the Bush administration's long awaited defence strategy review, according to reports in Washington. However, due to Russia's intention to restrict China's air projection capacities, and China's problems with absorbing Russian fighters, China has yet to achieve a meaningful enhancement of its air power capabilities from the purchases. China, in particular, sees the system as a major challenge to its security, and is likely to respond in ways that threaten US interests.