The Global Times tabloid, which in was six years old, took a sharply nationalistic turn after the Belgrade bombing, where it reported from the scene and found that patriotism sold newspapers. A special edition on the bombing shifted , copies, almost double that of regular editions at the time.
Twenty years on, China has transformed itself into a global technological, economic, and military powerhouse, but the humiliating memory of the bombing lives on. An article link in Chinese commemorating event, including a photo of flowers laid beside the memorial plaque at the site of the former embassy, went viral on Chinese social media this week. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was demolished in By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy.
Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. When the President's [Milosevic's] residence was bombed on 23 April, the signals disappeared for 24 hours.
When they came on the air again, we discovered they came from the embassy compound. After that was knocked out, it was moved to the Chinese embassy. The air controller said: 'The Chinese embassy had an electronic profile, which Nato located and pinpointed. The Observer investigation, carried out jointly with Politiken newspaper in Denmark, will cause embarrassment for Nato and for the British government. He is to stay at Buckingham Palace.
Jiang Zemin is still said to be outraged at the 7 May attack, which came close to splitting the alliance. Defence Secretary William Cohen said: 'One of our planes attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map.
Tenet apologised last July, saying: 'The President of the United States has expressed our sincere regret at the loss of life in this tragic incident and has offered our condolences to the Chinese people and especially to the families of those who lost their lives in this mistaken attack.
Nato's apology was predicated on the excuse that the three missiles which landed in one corner of the embassy block were meant to be targeted at the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement, the FDSP. By that afternoon, thousands of irate Chinese protesters would be gathered outside. But Rank, at that stage, was fairly calm. He rang his boss, the head of the political section: "I said, you know, Jim, this is the damndest thing.
The diplomat rushed from his residence to the embassy down the road, where US officials were trying to figure out what had happened. Something had clearly gone wrong but this must have been, had to have been, a tragic mistake. Obviously, it was a major problem, but not the sort of convulsive incident that it turned out to be," said Rank. But in the next hours, the shape of how the Chinese government and people would respond started to become clear.
Rank began receiving calls from liberal Chinese friends who were outraged at the bombing. American journalists got similar calls from Chinese contacts with pro-US views, expressing shock and a sense of betrayal.
Chinese state media was already laying out a clear narrative - the US had breached international law by bombing a Chinese diplomatic outpost. It was the same almost word-for-word lines of real anger," said Rank. By that afternoon thousands of students were streaming onto the streets of Beijing.
They gathered outside the embassy and things quickly turned violent. Beijing sidewalks aren't paved, they have big tiles and they were pulling those up and smashing them and throwing them over the walls. Many of those bits of concrete were crashing through the windows of a building where more than a dozen embassy staff, including US Ambassador James Sasser, had hunkered down.
Embassy cars were being defaced and attacked. The message was clear: the bombing was intentional and, as one slogan went, "the blood of Chinese must be repaid". The protests would continue the next day, with even more people - some reports said , - storming the diplomatic district, and pelting stones, paint, eggs and concrete at the British and American embassies.
Demonstrations of this scale had not been seen in tightly-controlled China in the decade since students led a pro-democracy uprising in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in This time the anger was directed away from the Communist Party but, with the 10th anniversary of the crackdown on students in Tiananmen approaching, the government had to strike a balance between giving vent to public anger and remaining in control. In a rare TV address Vice-President Hu Jintao endorsed the protests but also warned they had to remain "in accordance with the law".
The uproar was not isolated to Beijing. Crowds also took to the streets of Shanghai and other cities that weekend. In central Chengdu, the US consul's residence was set alight. Weiping Qin, a then year-old student leader at the maritime college in southern Guangzhou city, said demonstrators were not informed that Nato had already apologised for what it said was an accident. They didn't tell us - so young people, everybody, felt angry.
We just wanted to go in the streets and protest against the United States. He said that initially students at his college were told they had to stay in their dormitories. But 24 hours after the bombing, the university leadership told him that they needed 30, students in the streets around the US consulate - of whom would come from the maritime college. The fired-up students drew lots to choose who could attend.
They were loaded onto buses and given statements to read that echoed the stilted official language being broadcast by state media. But in the street, to speak out in long sentences is very hard. Our emotions came out like a wave," said Qin, who now lives in the US and criticises the Chinese government in YouTube videos.
David Rank agreed that the anger was genuine. Since the early s, China had embarked on a concerted campaign to instil nationalism and "patriotic education" in its people. The narrative pushed in school textbooks, university classrooms and the media was that China - home to a great and benevolent civilisation - had been subjugated and humiliated at the hands of Western powers.
The Belgrade embassy bombing fit the story. It was a purposeful, planned bombing, rather than an accident," he said. On the day of the bombing, Dusan Janjic, an academic and advocate for ethnic reconciliation in Yugoslavia, was having lunch at an upscale restaurant in central Belgrade with a man he considered a good friend. I'm not coming! He was being facetious: he did not actually think the embassy would be hit.
But Janjic couldn't make it to dinner and that evening, when the missiles flew into the building, Ren was thrown to the ceiling by the blast and then fell through a crater left by a bomb. He was found in the basement in a coma only the next morning. Citing Nato sources, they reported that the embassy was being used as a rebroadcast station for Yugoslav army communications and was as a result removed from a prohibited target list. But two decades later, Jens Holsoe, Politiken's correspondent in the Balkans from to , and John Sweeney, formerly of the Observer and now with the BBC, said they stood by their reporting that the bombing was intentional.
Holsoe said what made him investigate in the first place was CIA Chief George Tenet publicly saying that satellite images gave no indication the target was an embassy - "no flags, no seals, no clear markings" - when in fact all three were present. One of his sources - a very senior Danish military figure - almost went on the record to confirm publicly that the bombing was intentional, he said.
Holsoe said it was clear at the time that there was military co-operation between Serb forces and the Chinese - and that he personally saw military vehicles entering and exiting the Chinese embassy.
American officials told the New York Times that after the bombing they learned the embassy was China's most significant intelligence collection platform in Europe. Ren Baokai survived and was later given the rank of general.
He declined an interview with the BBC, saying he was now retired. The Chinese ambassador who narrowly survived the strike, Pan Zhanlin, denied in a book that the embassy had been used for re-broadcasting and that China, in exchange, had been given parts of the US F stealth fighter jet that Serbian forces had shot down in the early stages of the Nato campaign.
It's widely assumed that China did get hold of pieces of the plane to study its technology. It's also been speculated that China was using the Nato air campaign to test technology to track stealth bombers that are normally undetectable. But even if all these stories are true - the question remains: would the US really take the risk of bombing a Chinese embassy on purpose?
Even among ex-Yugoslav insiders there is no consensus.
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