What does secrecy over plane crash tell us about China’s security state?

Last Friday afternoon, a light aircraft belonging to a local aviation school flew into the side of Beijing’s tallest building, the 109-storey Citic Tower, killing the pilot and injuring at least 13 people.

Five days later, we’re none the wiser about “why, and how, that happened”, said the BBC. The only official statement on the incident is a “60-word report detailing the basic facts in state-owned Beijing Daily”, while eyewitness videos and photos have been “scrubbed off the internet”.

What did the commentators say?

The skyscraper is only a few miles from Zhongnanhai, the tightly controlled complex that acts as the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and the centre of government. An unidentified aircraft over this sensitive area would have posed a security dilemma for authorities, said Li Wei, director of the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Studies at the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

Once the plane deviated from its approved flight path, there would have been “little reaction time for air traffic control and air defence identification”, he told the South China Morning Post. “Shooting down a civilian aircraft in a crowded urban area would create potential ground threats and panic.”

Beijing has “some of the world’s strictest airspace controls”, including a “permanent no-fly zone of roughly 100 sq km (39 sq miles) over its political core”, said the BBC. Chong Ja Ian, a non-resident scholar at Carnegie China research centre, told the broadcaster that the incident would be an “embarrassment to the security services”. “A small plane hitting Citic Tower means that a drone or missile might be able to as well,” he said.

Although China “periodically” experiences high-profile “acts of suicidal violence”, the most likely explanation “lies not in protest but in privilege”, said James Palmer in Foreign Policy’s China Brief. Private planes are a rarity in China, reserved for the “well connected”, whose sense of entitlement “extends to the skies”. Corruption is “endemic” within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and “it would not be surprising if certain civilians were occasionally allowed into PLA airspace”. If that is what occurred here, “the political consequences will be severe for whoever bent the rules”.

What next?

Whether accidental or deliberate, “the fatal flight will raise awkward – and potentially career-ending – questions for those responsible for security” in the capital, said the Financial Times. At next year’s Communist Party Congress, Xi Jinping is expected to “choose a new line-up of top party cadres”, and regional analysts say responsibility for the Citic Tower incident could fuel “fierce jockeying among leadership candidates”.