On a person-to-person basis however, anger rarely spilled over into outright violence. ![]() “People in China were convinced to the last man that it was deliberate.” “As far as proof to the Chinese people that the US can’t be trusted, the embassy bombing will be the gift that keeps on giving for years to come,” said Laszlo Montgomery, host of the popular China History Podcast. In an editorial on the 10th anniversary of the incident, People’s Daily criticized the West’s failure to properly address the bombing, demonstrating that the “latent hostility the US holds towards China seems not to have vanished.” “I don’t think I met a single Chinese person at that time, and have only met a small handful since, who believed that was an accident,” said Kaiser Kuo, an American living in Beijing at the time. He added that the bombing’s primary effect was to “mobilize popular Chinese nationalism in a powerfully anti-American way.” “The regime cultivates the sense that China has been, and to a certain degree still is, victimized by Western imperialism,” Crane said. ![]() When President Clinton and representatives of the US State Department formally apologized for the bombings, the news was not broadcast by Chinese state-run media for several days, during which the demonstrations became angrier.Īccording to Sam Crane, professor of political science at Williams College and author of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao: Ancient Chinese Thought in Modern American Life," the bombing, accidental or not, was a propaganda coup for the Communist Party, which had been working hard through its patriotic education campaign to foster anti-American nationalism in the years after the pro-democracy protests of 1989. Beijing was accused of bussing protesters to the US embassy. In crisis there is opportunity, and Party officials appeared eager to stoke tensions to their benefit. In China however, the incident was seen as deliberate, a “barbaric attack, a gross violation of Chinese sovereignty,” as an official statement phrased it. That view is accepted by most in the West. The US and NATO have always insisted that the incident was a tragic accident, the result of the CIA providing the wrong coordinates for a Yugoslav military target on the same street. Irate demonstrators in Chengdu and Guangzhou attempted to set fire to consulates there. James Sasser and several other personnel remained trapped inside the American embassy for several days. The bombs struck their target almost simultaneously, killing three, injuring 20 others and reducing much of the building to rubble.Īcross China, huge protests erupted, with thousands of people hurling rocks at US diplomatic facilities. ![]() Five US JDAM guided missiles hit the Chinese embassy. ![]() Oddly enough, while it succeeded in degrading admiration for the US government, it seems to have barely affected how Chinese people view American citizens.įifteen years ago, on the night of May 7, 1999, B-2 stealth bombers took off from the Whiteman Air Force base in Missouri bound for Belgrade, Yugoslavia. SHANGHAI, China - Was it a mistake? Or was it an intentional assault carried out under the cover of a larger bombing campaign?Įither way, the bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War, played directly into the hands of a Communist Party keen to foment anti-American feeling a decade after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
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