When I was in Beijing during the protests in 1989, a
middle-aged man came up to me and asked, “Couldn’t America send some B-52s here
and…” and he made a swooping motion with his hand.
Ten years later, on May 7, 1999, the American bombers did
show up.
Instead of showering freedom ordnance on China’s dictators,
however, they dropped five bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
As to why this happened, the United States has always
declared it was an accident.
A lot of people in China believe otherwise and there is a good amount of evidence to support their view.
The bombing of the embassy was a wake-up call for the PRC
leadership, which decided it urgently needed a doctrine and capabilities beyond
its strategic nuclear deterrent to handle disagreements with the United States
that might acquire a military dimension.
It was also a propaganda godsend for the regime.
Chinese demonstrators were back on the streets, but
protesting against the United States instead of against the PRC regime’s
deficiencies in Western democratic values.
Americans and the U.S. media had a hard time getting used to
this unfavorable turn in some popular Chinese attitudes away from 1989
democracy-love, blaming the ill-feeling on the suppression of news of President
Clinton’s apology.
In the July 2001 China Journal, Peter Hays Gries of Ohio
State University analyzed letters and submissions to China’s Guangming Daily
and characterized the protests as “genuine and understandable” and largely
unrelated to unawareness of the presidential apology.
On the ten-year anniversary of the bombing, China Digital
Times linked to an interview with a student who identified the bombing as the
trigger for a sea-change in the worldview of at least some Chinese:
Over the past decade, I think the young Chinese have gradually dropped their illusion of the U.S. and begun to view it more objectively.
After reform and opening-up, to be more specific in the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese people began to know more about the outside world. The prosperity of the west attracted the young people so much that all of a sudden everybody wanted to go abroad. At that time, we had a popular saying, “Moon of the west is even more beautiful than that of China.” Experiencing the sharp contrast between China and the west, many Chinese people became critical of China, perhaps in a cynical way.
However, when the Chinese embassy was bombed, many people began to think: is this the kind of democracy and human rights that we want to pursue?
Post Iraq-war, it is difficult to remember the years when
the United States effortlessly claimed the moral high ground. But in 1999, I remember that I also
discounted Chinese whinging about the Belgrade embassy accident.
Writing in 2001, Gries provides a reminder:
The demonstrations
shocked the US media, which quickly pointed blame at the Chinese government for
inflaming the protests. A brief review
of major US newspaper editorials of 11 May reveals a consensus view: the
Chinese people were not genuinely angry with (innocent) America; they were,
rather, manipulated by Communist propaganda that the bombing was
intentional…The Washington Post declared: “The Big Lie is alive and well in
Beijing”…Such “state-supervised anger”, the Boston Globe declared, was neither
genuine nor popular. The “brutes in
Beijing” were responsible for the Chinese people’s mistaken belief that the bombing was
intentional.
A contentious interview conducted by Jim Lehrer with the
Chinese ambassador to the US, Li Zhaoxing, immediately subsequent to the
attack, is enlightening for the cognitive dissonance provoked by Li’s refusal
to share Lehrer's confidence that the US would publicly and honestly sort out what was obviously just a regrettable goof. Looking back at the interview through the
perspective provided by the shameless mendacity of the Bush administration over
the Iraq War, it is Lehrer and not Li who looks delusional and out of touch.
JIM LEHRER: Yes, sir. But my question is: why would you think that it would not be an accident or a mistake? In other words, why would you think-- to repeat my question, why would you think that the United States would intentionally kill Chinese citizens in downtown Belgrade?
LI ZHAOXING: Ask your own people. Ask your own officials. Ask your own experts. If they ask themselves, seriously, honestly, do they really believe that this is simply a kind of mistake?
…
JIM LEHRER: Are you suggesting that
that is not the intention of the United States, to do exactly what you-- in
other words, to conduct a full investigation and hold the people responsible
for this?LI ZHAOXING: We attach more to facts, rather than words. No matter how eloquent one could be.
In addition to his encounter with Jim Lehrer, Li Zhaoxing received further
instruction on American attitudes from another, less courtly source.
Gries passes on a
report in the Washington Post in which Tom DeLay, the Republican whip in the
House of Representatives, revealed to Li his own formula for managing US-PRC
relations, one that did not depend on apologies:
I was on Meet the
Press…right after the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Kosovo [he meant
Belgrade], and the [Chinese] ambassador was on before me. And if you remember, he’s kind of an
obnoxious fellow and he’s screaming and yelling about how bad the Americans
were, and I had had it up to about here.
So he’s coming off the stage and I’m going onto the stage and I
intentionally walked up to him and blocked his way…I grabbed [his] hand and
squeezed it as hard as I could and pulled him a kind of little jerk like this
and I said: “Don’t take the weakness of this president as the weakness of the
American people”. And he looked at me
kind of funny, so I pulled him real close, nose to nose, and I repeated it very
slowly, and said, “Do-not-take-the-weakness-of
this president as the weakness of the American people”.
I expect Li Zhaoxing recalled Mr. DeLay’s solicitude as well
as Jim Lehrer’s amazed disbelief when he returned to Beijing to become China’s
Minister of Foreign Affairs.
A tentative answer to Jim Lehrer’s query as to why the
United States might take the dastardly step of bombing the Chinese embassy can
be found in my articles from early 2007 on the Belgrade incident: the
persistent rumor that attack was conducted to destroy wreckage of a US stealth
fighter shot down over Serbia, which the Milosevic government had delivered to
the PRC in gratitude for services rendered (or perhaps traded to the PRC in return for presumably safe and secure radio retransmission facilities from inside the Belgrade embassy for the Serbian military, whose communications network was a focus of NATO strikes).
The story that China might have acquired key Stealth
technology from the crash in Yugoslavia acquired a lot of legs after China
test-flew its first stealth fighter, the J20, in January 2011, as I wrote in
Asia Times.
During the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) campaign against Serbia in 1999, an American F-117A stealth fighter was shot down. Some wreckage undoubtedly made it into Chinese hands. Slobodan Lekic and Dusan Stojanovic of the Associated Press (AP) reported on January 23:
"At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese
agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts
of the plane from local farmers," says Admiral Davor Domazet-Loso,
Croatia's military chief of staff during the Kosovo war.
"We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into secret stealth technologies ... and to reverse-engineer them," Domazet-Loso said in a telephone interview.
A senior Serbian military official confirmed that pieces of the wreckage were removed by souvenir collectors, and that some ended up "in the hands of foreign military attaches". [2]
"We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into secret stealth technologies ... and to reverse-engineer them," Domazet-Loso said in a telephone interview.
A senior Serbian military official confirmed that pieces of the wreckage were removed by souvenir collectors, and that some ended up "in the hands of foreign military attaches". [2]
The idea that the United States had not taken adequate steps
to secure the F-117A wreckage and useful technology may have thereby found its
way into enemy hands is apparently rather irksome to the Pentagon.
Elizabeth Bumiller transmitted the US official pushback in the January 26 New York Times article titled "US Doubts '99 Jet Debris Gave China Stealth Edge":
Elizabeth Bumiller transmitted the US official pushback in the January 26 New York Times article titled "US Doubts '99 Jet Debris Gave China Stealth Edge":
[I]t's hard to imagine that a great deal of applicable and
useful information could have been culled from the site," said an Air
Force official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak
publicly about military intelligence. [3]
Interestingly and perhaps not surprisingly, even as this
narrative of PRC military espionage cum
trashpicking was advanced, I didn’t see anybody pursue the logical corollary:
that acknowledgment that China had possessed Stealth wreckage buttressed the
allegation that the US government might have bombed the Chinese embassy in
Belgrade in order to destroy the sensitive technology.
In reading my dissection of the Belgrade bombing, its myths
and legends, the reader can draw his own conclusions about the context it
provides for subsequent US-PRC confrontations and strategies and the attendant
media hoopla.
A final prefatory note:
One element that contemporary readers might find hard to
swallow is my assertion that the mission that destroyed the Chinese embassy was
the only target selected by the CIA.
Well, that’s what George Tenet, Director of the CIA,
said. It is a mystery to me why he
considered this revelation in any way exculpatory.
From the July 23, 1999 New York Times:
"It was the only target we nominated," the
director, George Tenet, said at a rare public hearing of the House Intelligence
Committee.
After the strike on May 7, which killed three Chinese and
wounded at least 20 others, the CIA decided it better go back to its usual
business of spying, a U.S. official said Thursday. Reeling from its error, the
agency almost immediately suspended other preparations it was making to forward
additional targets to help NATO.
