A U.S. Admiral’s Bluntness Rattles China, and Washington
The Saturday Profile
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/07/world/asia/us-admiral-harry-harris.html?_r=1By JANE PERLEZ MAY 6, 2016
“I will say I’m a military guy. I look through the lenses darkly, and that’s what I’m paid to do.” ADM. HARRY B. HARRIS JR. Credit Cliff Owen/Associated Press
HONOLULU — He has called China “provocative and expansionist,” accusing it of “creating a Great Wall of sand” and “clearly militarizing” the disputed waters of the Western Pacific. “You’d have to believe in a flat earth to think otherwise,” he said in one appearance before Congress.
These are the words of the American commander in charge of military operations in the Asia-Pacific region, Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., who has turned heads — and caused headaches — in Beijing as well as in Washington with language starker than any coming from his commander in chief, President Obama.
Admiral Harris makes no apologies for his candor, which has unsettled a more cautious White House. As China builds militarily fortified islands in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway long dominated by the United States, it is his job, he says, to talk to Congress, the American public and allies abroad about the threat.
“There is a natural tension between elements of the government and the chain of command, and I think it’s a healthy tension,” he said during an interview in his office, perched high above Pearl Harbor. “I’ve voiced my views in private meetings with our national command authorities. Some of my views are taken in; some are not.”
For the Chinese, Admiral Harris, 59, is not only a tough talker. He was born in Japan, the son of a Japanese mother and an American father who was a chief petty officer in the American Navy. The Chinese have zeroed in on his ethnicity as a mode of attack.
“Some may say an overemphasis on the Japanese background about an American general is a bit unkind,” Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, wrote. “But to understand the American’s sudden upgraded offensive in the South China Sea, it is simply impossible to ignore Admiral Harris’s blood, background, political inclination and values.”
The derogatory comments had two goals, the admiral said. First, they were meant to show that the Pacific Command was “disconnected from the rest of government,” an idea that was “completely untrue.”
Second, they seemed intended to tarnish him. “You know when I am described as a Japanese admiral it’s not true. I am not sure why they have to have an adjective in front of admiral.”
When his family moved back to rural Tennessee, his mother refused to teach him Japanese, insisting that her son was 100 percent American. In that vein, the admiral does not make much of the fact that he is the first Asian-American to be appointed a combatant commander.
That insistence on his American identity makes the Chinese comments particularly galling to him. “In some respects, they try to demonize me, and that’s really ugly,” he said. “I think in a lot of ways the communications that come out of the Chinese public affairs organ, they are tone deaf and insulting.”
