The Hainan Spy Plane Crisis, an Oral History

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Good evening. Twenty five years ago this week, on April 1, 2001, a Chinese jet fighter and an American EP-3 spy plane collided over the South China Sea. The jet fighter plunged into the sea and its pilot, Wang Wei, was never found. The spy plane almost crashed as well, with 24 crew on board, but the pilot Shane Osborn was able to pull it out of its near fatal dive and make an emergency landing at the same People’s Liberation Army air base that Wang flew out of. George W. Bush’s presidency was supposed to be the first of the Asian Century and this crisis, occurring less than three months into his administration seemed to confirm that. It would be a tense 11 days on Hainan before Beijing and Washington negotiated a resolution and the PLA released the American crew. To mark the anniversary, The Wire China is running the first of a two-part series on the Hainan crisis drawn from interviews with, and first-person accounts written by, participants in the first high-stakes geopolitical drama of the 21st century.In this week’s Wire China podcast, Tom Mitchell introduces the series and talks with Rachel Cheung about the recent memoir written by Wang Wei’s widow.Other items in this week’s issue: The OpenClaw frenzy; meet XPeng, the Big Picture’s Company in the News; Neil Shearing on our “fractured age”; and a Canadian debate over Chinese forced labor.Subscribe nowIllustration by Sam WardEleven Days, Part 1In addition to the ten participants in the Hainan spy plane crisis who spoke at length with The Wire China for our two-part series, Condoleezza Rice shared this memory of the incide…