NY Times
China’s Actions in Hunt for Jet Are Seen as Hurting as Much as Helping
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — When a Chinese government vessel took the world by surprise this month with its announcement that it had detected underwater signals that might have come from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, China suddenly looked like the hero of the multinational search effort.
Within days, however, the Chinese claims were discounted, and attention shifted to another set of signals recorded by American personnel aboard an Australian ship hundreds of miles away.
Still, the Chinese claims have exasperated some officials from the United States and other participating countries. The announcement was only one in a series of moves by China that might have been intended to project competence, according to officials and analysts, but only served to distract and delay the search effort.
“Everybody wants to find the plane,” said a senior Defense Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to appear overly critical of the Chinese. But, he continued, “false leads slow down the investigation.”
Mechanics of the Plane Search, Explained
How the multinational team off the coast of Australia is continuing the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Credit By Christian Roman, Emily B. Hager and Ben Laffin on Publish Date April 9, 2014
Credit Lsis Bradley Darvill / Navy Imagery Unit / Dod/European Pressphoto Agency
Most of the passengers on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were Chinese citizens, so the matter became a top priority for China. Since the plane’s disappearance on March 8, Beijing has deployed reconnaissance aircraft, more than a dozen vessels and, it said, 21 satellites in the search. Many of the ships in the current search zone, in the southern Indian Ocean, are Chinese.
The mission has clearly been a prime opportunity for the Chinese government to demonstrate its determination and technological abilities to its domestic audience, and to improve on its response to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines last year, which was widely criticized as late and tepid.
“This is a chance for China to regain some of its lost prestige and show the world what it’s capable of,” said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at the Tokyo campus of Temple University. “There’s a lot of prestige on the line here.”
But the search has also brought China into sudden and close contact with regional competitors who have been uneasy with China’s rapid military expansion and its increasing willingness to project force across a wider area of the globe. With regional tensions already high before the plane disappeared, China’s rush to be first upset others involved in the search — not least because the Chinese turned out to be wrong.
In the first week of the search, China released satellite photographs purportedly showing wreckage in the South China Sea. The objects, however, turned out to be unrelated debris. The claim eventually elicited a rebuke from Malaysian officials that China had wasted the time of other nations looking for the missing Boeing 777-200.
On April 5, Chinese state-run news media reported that Haixun 01, a Chinese government search vessel apparently operating outside the zone designated that day by the search coordinators, had twice detected underwater signals that might have come from the missing plane’s flight recorders.
Photographs published by the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, showed crewmen using a hand-held hydrophone intended for use in shallow water, casting doubt on the value of the claims.
The delay in deploying Echo to join Ocean Shield may have cost searchers the opportunity to record more signals and narrow the underwater search area, officials say.
