2007 KITTY HAWK PORT CALL REFUSAL SHEDS LIGHT ON

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 BEIJING 001145

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 03/26/2033
TAGS: MARR PREL MOPS MASS PGOV CH TW
SUBJECT: 2007 KITTY HAWK PORT CALL REFUSAL SHEDS LIGHT ON
PRC DECISION MAKING PROCESS

REF: 06 BEIJING 7273

Classified By: Classified by: Charge d'Affaires, a.i., Daniel Piccuta.
Reasons 1.4 (b/d).

SUMMARY
--------------


1. (C) The PRC's refusal of the USS Kitty Hawk port visit to
Hong Kong for Thanksgiving in November 2007 was a last-minute
decision by the Central Military Commission (CMC) made in
anger over the November 9, 2007 announcement of further U.S.
weapons sales to Taiwan, according to a majority of scholars
with whom PolOff has spoken since the incident. The
announcement of the weapons sale "totally destroyed the
atmosphere created by Secretary Gates' visit" earlier that
month and angered several CMC members, contacts say. Poor
inter-ministry coordination, especially between military and
civilian entities, almost certainly meant the CMC did not
understand the importance of the planned Thanksgiving holiday
family gatherings to the USS Kitty Hawk crew. The belated
reversal of the decision was based on an MFA recommendation,
and though handled quickly, also reflected poor
inter-ministry coordination, catching the PLA by surprise.
PLA pique at the arms sale, reversal of the PLA's port call
refusal and subsequent USS Kitty Hawk Carrier Strike Group
transit of the Taiwan Strait caused a PLA backlash that
complicated the damage control process and led to the MFA's
public denial of Foreign Minister Yang's claim to President
Bush that the refusal had been a "misunderstanding." Many
contacts believe the reversal of the port call refusal made
PRC President Hu look weak, for which Hu reportedly was
criticized. Despite the problems with China's handling of
the USS Kitty Hawk Hong Kong port visit, most Chinese
academics think PRC crisis management has improved in recent
years. The Kitty Hawk refusal was handled better than other
past incidents, such as the 2001 EP-3 collision, January 2007
ASAT test and 1998 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in
Belgrade, contacts say. End Summary.

PORT CALL REFUSAL DRIVEN BY ANGER OVER WEAPONS SALE
-------------- --------------


2. (C) China's decision to refuse the November 2007 Kitty
Hawk Carrier Strike Group (CSG) port visit to Hong Kong was
driven by the Central Military Commission (CMC),according to
Professor Zhu Feng (protect),Deputy Director of Beijing
University School of International Studies, who is
researching the decision as part of a larger study of PRC
crisis management. The Kitty Hawk issue came before the CMC
for decision at the inauspicious moment of CMC pique over
U.S. arms sales to Taiwan in November, and became the de
facto vehicle for reprisal, Zhu said. Zhu, who has conducted
"research and interviews" on the Kitty Hawk issue, told
EmbOffs on January 30 that although CMC members had initially
planned to approve the port visit, their anger over the
Department of Defense's November 9 announcement of the
possible sale of the Patriot upgrade to Taiwan, coming just
three days after the Secretary of Defense's November 5-6
visit to Beijing, caused a CMC member to "slap the table" and
recommend denial of the U.S. port visit request. Xue Chen
(protect),a Research Fellow at the Shanghai Institute for
International Studies (SIIS),told PolOff March 18 that the
weapons sale announcement "totally destroyed the atmosphere
created by Secretary Gates' visit" and angered several CMC
members. Following an unknown amount of deliberation, the
CMC made a consensus decision to refuse the visit, Zhu said.
Although no contacts claimed to know which CMC member drove
the initiative to refuse the visit, most scholars speculated
it was probably not PLA Navy Commander Wu Shengli, since
improved naval military-to-military relations is a special
focus of his.


3. (C) Wu Xinbo (protect),Deputy Director of the Center for
American Studies at Fudan University, was surprised to hear
the PRC had never given the United States an official reason
for the port visit refusal. "It was the arms sale," Wu told
us March 18, asserting that it was a CMC decision and thus
certainly was unrelated to the October 17, 2007 presentation
of the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama.
(Note: PolOff could find only one reference in official
Communist Party media about the cause of the refusal: The
Herald Tribune, Associated Press and USA Today all cite an
article in the Global Times, a newspaper run by the Communist
Party's flagship People's Daily newspaper, which quotes an
unidentified PLA Senior Colonel as saying the cause was the

BEIJING 00001145 002.2 OF 004


November weapons sales announcement.)


4. (C) While the PRC has denied ship visits in the past in
order to make a political statement, this was the first time
a refusal had been delivered with less than the stipulated
five days notice. The Kitty Hawk CSG sailed toward Hong Kong
in advance of an expected PRC approval and waited at the
12-mile mark outside Hong Kong Harbor for almost 20 hours
before being informed by the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs
(MFA) Commission in Hong Kong that the visit was refused.
Xia Liping (protect),Director of the SIIS American Studies
Department, told PolOffs on March 18 that the late decision
to refuse the Kitty Hawk port visit was indicative of the
time-consuming process needed for PRC decisions, which are
consensus-driven. With the Taiwan arms sale announced only
shortly before the Kitty Hawk visit, it was difficult to make
a refusal decision in a more timely manner. "Routine
decisions take a long time," Xia said, "and a refusal takes
even longer." (Note: Then-CMC Vice Chairman and Minister of
National Defense Cao Gangchuan as well as Chief of the
General Staff Chen Bingde, also a CMC member, were on
international travel during part of the week before the Kitty
Hawk visit, perhaps further complicating the decision making
process.)


5. (C) While it is clear the CMC made the decision to deny
the visit request, Xia said, it is not clear if the
recommendation came from the PLA General Staff Department
(GSD),which would have added still more time to the
decision-making process. The GSD sends its reports directly
to the CMC, Xia said, with a courtesy copy to the Foreign
Affairs Central Leading Group (FACLG),which is headed by
President Hu Jintao, if the issue could impact relations with
a foreign country, as would certainly have been the case with
the Kitty Hawk port visit.

COMPARTMENTED DECISIONS: CMC UNAWARE OF THANKSGIVING
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6. (C) SIIS's Xue Chen said the biggest problem with PRC
decision making is the "complete lack of coordination
mechanisms" between ministries, "especially between the
military and civilians." "That's one of the major reasons
behind the Government's decision to create new
'super-Ministries'," Xue said. In accordance with a
well-established procedure followed since 1997, the MFA
controls the information flow at the ministry level and below
for Hong Kong port visit requests. The PRC MFA Commission in
Hong Kong receives a port visit request from the U.S.
Consulate General in Hong Kong and then forwards the request
to the MFA in Beijing for submission to senior leaders for
decision. Responses follow the same channel back down. MFA
and GSD reporting channels do not intersect below the FACLG,
Xue observed, so inter-ministry coordination is very limited.
Xue said it is likely the MFA did not anticipate the CMC
refusal and thus had not prepared their report to the senior
leadership with an adequate explanation of the importance of
Thanksgiving in U.S. culture. Scholars were not unanimous in
their views about whether the MFA office in Beijing or Hong
Kong was primarily to blame for poor information flow. "In
any case, it is very unlikely the CMC knew anything about
Thanksgiving," Xue said. (Note: The exact method and timing
of PLA input into the decision-making process remains
unclear.)

CHINA'S TIME-CONSUMING DECISION MAKING PROCESS
-------------- -


7. (C) Professor Niu Jun (protect),who teaches
graduate-level PRC Foreign Policy Formulation at Beijing
University, told PolOff that routine decisions like port
visit requests are handled in the form of ministry reports
that follow "very formalized regulations." Calling the
process "very secret" and admitting that he was speculating,
Niu said that each ministry is only allowed one consolidated
opinion and that the three most relevant Vice Ministers must
sign off on a report before going forward for the Minister's
final, often pro forma, approval. Niu said he had heard of a
case where an important decision was delayed for weeks simply
because a specific Vice Minister was ill and unavailable to
approve the report. Each approving official circles their
name on the report to indicate their concurrence. The report
is then forwarded to the secretary of the next higher office
who prioritizes each report for action. "Secretaries can
thus have quite a bit of power; they can slide a report to
the bottom of the pile and keep it there," Niu stated.

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Actions requiring higher priority may follow a different path
up the chain: routine decision reports are forwarded to the
Central Committee General Office for senior leader action.
More time-sensitive MFA issues are handled directly between
the Foreign Minister and the State Councilor in charge of
foreign affairs, "who can then talk directly to President Hu
Jintao." Niu noted that since the Ministry of National
Defense has no Vice Ministers, they must follow a different
procedure, "probably submitting their opinions via the GSD's
Foreign Affairs Department."


8. (C) Almost all the academics with whom we spoke agreed
that the MFA was neither the final decision maker nor likely
to have submitted a report recommending refusal of the port
visit. Li Genxin (protect),Secretary General of the Chinese
Institute for International Studies (CIIS) and a former MFA
official, told PolOff, "there is no way the MFA stuck its
neck out to block this visit." Saying it is not Foreign
Minister Yang Jiechi's style to stand out like that, Li
insisted that, "the MFA would not cause a problem that they
knew they would be left having to fix." Putting things in
broader perspective, Cheng Xiaohe (protect),Research Fellow
in the Renmin University School of International Studies,
said the decision was certainly made above the Minister
level. "If anything abrupt happens in Chinese politics, you
know it was a Politburo Standing Committee member action,"
Cheng averred.


9. (C) Two notable dissenting opinions, conveyed in two
separate meetings, came from Wu Baiyi (protect),Deputy
Director for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Jin
Canrong (protect),Renmin University Associate Dean.
Admitting they had not given the issue much thought, each
separately said that the MFA was probably empowered to make
this decision on its own but was perhaps unable to achieve an
intra-Ministry consensus in time due to bureaucratic
problems. China Foundation for International and Strategic
Studies Director Chen Zhiya (protect) held a slightly
different view, saying that while the decision was likely
made by someone on the CMC, it would not have necessitated a
CMC consensus decision.

WHAT ABOUT USS GUARDIAN AND USS PATRIOT REFUSALS?
-------------- --------------


10. (C) Our sources generally agreed that the decision to
refuse the minesweepers USS Guardian and USS Patriot access
to Hong Kong, who had requested permission to visit Hong Kong
so as to avoid an approaching storm, and which occurred at
almost the same time as the Kitty Hawk CSG refusal, was
likely another example of poor PRC decision making based on
an overly compartmentalized vertical information flow.
Officials in the PRC bureaucracy do not understand naval
customs requiring that safe harbor be given to ships in such
a situation, SIIS's Xue said, and given the poor PRC
horizontal coordination channels, there were no checks in
place to catch this kind of error. According to Xue, "When a
CMC policy comes down that says 'refuse U.S. warships,' no
one has the guts to question it." (Note: The November 19
request to the PRC MFA Commission in Hong Kong for USS
Guardian and USS Patriot to visit Hong Kong so as to avoid a
storm would have had the two minesweepers entering Hong Kong
Harbor at just about the same time as the Kitty Hawk CSG.
The Kitty Hawk and minesweeper refusals were delivered by the
PRC MFA Commission in Hong Kong within three hours of each
other on November 21.)

HU'S REVERSAL DRIVEN BY MFA RECOMMENDATION
--------------


11. (C) The original decision to deny the Kitty Hawk port
visit request was based on a CMC consensus, so the subsequent
reversal of that decision must have been made by President Hu
Jintao, according to Yuan Peng (protect),Research Professor
at the Ministry of State Security-affiliated China Institutes
of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). "No other
CMC member could make such a decision alone," Yuan told
PolOff. Yuan further elaborated that only when faced with
situations requiring immediate action can President Hu make
such decisions in the absence of consensus. Beijing
University's Niu said the reversal, like the original
decision, would have been driven and informed by one or
several written reports. As it is unlikely the PLA submitted
a report to overturn a decision made by its own most senior
leaders, and since the Deputy Secretary, Department of
Defense and the U.S. Embassy's protests of the port call

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refusal entered the PRC Government through the MFA, it was
probably the MFA that wrote the report, Niu said. SIIS's Xue
noted the MFA must have had a "strong argument and strong
evidence" to reverse the CMC decision, opining that China's
public justification for the reversal being "humanitarian
reasons" was probably part of the MFA report to Hu. Because
an immediate decision was required, the report probably
passed through State Councilor for Foreign Affairs Tang
Jiaxuan directly to President Hu. (Comment: Given the
formalized process needed to generate Ministry consensus for
such reports and the fact that FM Yang Jiechi was busy with
his visit to the United States, VFM Zhang Yesui's comment to
the DCM (reftel) that he had "worked all night" on the issue
appears plausible.)

BAD DECISION MAKING II: REVERSAL HANDLED POORLY
-------------- --


12. (C) SIIS's Xue said that since there are almost no
mechanisms for inter-ministry coordination, the PLA was
caught just as off-guard by the reversal of the port visit
refusal as MFA had been by the initial decision. The
reversal was very unpopular in the PLA, but there was not
adequate time to write a dissenting report. FM Yang's
statement to President Bush on November 28 in Washington that
the port visit refusal had been a "misunderstanding" makes
sense in the context of MFA's efforts to reverse the poorly
informed initial decision, Xue asserted. By that point,
however, the CMC's anger over the weapons sale had been
compounded by the reversal of their initial refusal, which in
turn was exacerbated by the subsequent Kitty Hawk CSG transit
of the Taiwan Strait, which "caused a backlash within the
PLA," Xue said. Claiming the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis
angered the PLA so much that 100 flag officers had signed a
letter to the Government arguing the PRC "should not allow a
U.S. CSG into the Taiwan Strait again," Xue said the PLA
probably was behind the Foreign Ministry spokesman's
retraction of FM Yang's "misunderstanding" statement the next
day, November 29, because the PLA "did not want to lose more
face." (Note: The MFA spokesman cited U.S. actions that had
"disturbed and harmed" the bilateral relationship.) Beijing
University's Zhu Feng also emphasized to PolOff that the
reversal of the port visit request "made President Hu look
bad: indecisive and sheepish." Zhu said that President Hu
is "taking a lot of heat" for that decision.

PRC CRISIS DECISION MAKING IMPROVING?
--------------


13. (C) Although none of the academics PolOff interviewed
praised PRC handling of the Kitty Hawk port visit refusal,
most agreed that PRC crisis management procedures are
improving. CICIR's Yuan Peng said, "We learned from the EP-3
incident and handled the Kitty Hawk better than we otherwise
would have." SIIS's Xue compared the Kitty Hawk refusal to
the 1998 Chinese Embassy bombing in Belgrade, quipping, "That
took us 11 days just to figure out what 'sorry' meant."
CIIS's Li Genxin separately agreed, noting, "The EP-3 and
ASAT issues took days just to understand what was going on.
We are better at crisis management now, and it showed with
the Kitty Hawk." Beijing University's Niu Jun did not agree.
Though admitting the decision making system has become more
consensus-driven, Niu nevertheless contends that high-level
decision making, especially in crises, always reverts to the
"usual dynamics" of tight information control and poor
inter-ministerial coordination, which is based in part on the
relationship between the Party and the PLA. "China always
does things the 'old way' during a crisis," Niu said, adding,
"Just look at the information control going on with the
Tibet-related unrest right now."
PICCUTA