A Hainan Airplane Allegory

In April 2001 a US reconaissance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan Island in southern China. A full review of the incident is available from Wikipedia. I was in Nanjing at the time and there was clearly a great deal of diplomatic tension between the US and China because of this, though there was very little ill-will or resentment that I could see from regular people in Nanjing (as I mentioned in a previous post).

The US press blamed the incident on a hot-dogging Chinese pilot, who was killed in the collision. The Chinese press blamed the US, claiming the incident was due to reckless provoction. As a father of small children at the time, the whole thing seemed very familiar. It was like my two youngest jumping on the sofa and pushing each other around. Then when one falls off and gets hurt they both blame the other and in some sense they are both right and both wrong.

Anyway, here is my short allegory which I wrote at the time.


No analogy or allegory is perfect, but sometime you can learn something from one.

Once upon a time there was a fairly successful U.S. business; let’s call it something quasi-meaningful like the Enterprise Corporation. Enterprise was on a role, expanding it’s sales after several years of poor management. They had a new product line out that was doing very well and they were now the second or third biggest supplier in their industry. Stock prices were up and things look generally pretty rosy. Especially since they had overcome a period of terrible sales following a near bankruptcy several years earlier. During that turbulent era the company had lost sales to a series of large international rivals. These companies had raided Enterprise’s R&D labs and hired away all of their best engineers. Though no one was able to prove any illegality, it was pretty clear that they had stolen many of their best design ideas in the process. Eventually one of these had emerged as the dominant firm in the market; let’s call them Hercules International, based in the Far East. Hercules was clearly the market leader with more than half the industry’s sales.

Anyway, things were going well. Enterprise had a largely loyal workforce, though there were some troubling labor rumblings. Financially, things could’ve been better, but they had certainly been worse.

In the midst of all of this, corporate security reported that there were some disturbing goings on. Every week or so a large unmarked van drove by the main research campus and rolled slowly past the warehouse doors where Enterprise kept it’s latest prototypes. It didn’t take much effort to discover that the van was full of photographers hired by Hercules that were snapping away in hopes of getting useful photos. Enterprise wasn’t run by dummies, and they did the best they could to keep their latest ideas under wraps, but they knew they eventually had to test them out-of-doors and they were worried that Hercules might pick up on something they could exploit.

Enterprise decided that they would not let this continue uncontested. They had several security people who began patrolling the roads around the plant on motorcycles. Whenever the van would show up they would tailgate, or zoom in front and then slow down and otherwise harass the driver. Part of this was to distract the photographers, but mostly it was to send a clear message to Hercules that they knew what was going on and were not happy about it.

Eventually, the whole thing developed into a real road race, with motorcycles swerving back and forth and the van alternately speeding up and slowing down and occasionally changing lanes unexpectedly (just like your run-of-the-mill action film).

Well, as you might expect (since there’s supposed to be a point to this story), one day there was an accident. Though the details weren’t clear it appeared that the van swerved to avoid one motorcycle and hit the other. The rider was seriously injured and was rushed to the hospital. The van plowed through the retaining fence stopping on Enterprise’s property. Plant security responded and took the van driver and his passengers to the infirmary where they were treated for minor cuts and bruises. While the van was unattended much of the photographic equipment and film disappeared. Enterprise eventually turned everything over to the police, but not until after they developed the film and made copies.

Now the questions: Who is responsible for the accident? Who was the aggressor and who was the victim? Or do such distinctions make any sense in this case?