Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and thus transcended considerations of national sovereignty. The lens
through which China continued to view the rest of the world was, first
and foremost, colored by national sovereignty.
The single greatest strain on Sino-Western relations since the
Tiananmen Square Massacre came in May 1999, when NATO aircraft
bombing the Serbian capital city of Belgrade destroyed the Chinese
embassy there. NATO claimed that the bombing was accidental and
immediately apologized profusely to the Chinese government for it,
but this did not mollify public opinion in China. Some Western stra-
tegic analysts speculated that the bombing was a deliberate response
to the Chinese embassy's communications assistance to Serbian forces,
whose own communications infrastructure had been largely disrupted
during NATO's bombing campaign against Serb atrocities in Kosovo.
Enraged mobs in Beijing and other major Chinese cities surrounded
American and British diplomatic compounds, foreign student dormi-
tories, and any other place they identified with the Western presence,
including even American fast-food outlets, and pelted them with pro-
jectiles. Security forces worked hard to maintain order and minimize
the destruction, but rioters were permitted to throw almost any object
light enough to pick up at the American and British embassies in
Beijing. Mobs denounced President Bill Clinton as Adolf Hitler
and equated NATO with the Nazis, and on American television Li
Zhaoxing, the Chinese ambassador to the United States at the time
and a diplomat with only a mediocre command of English, lectured
American journalists on the evils of NATO rather than listening and
responding to their questions. In Beijing, the American ambassador
and several members of his staff remained sequestered in diplomatic
offices and away from their residences for several days. Electronic
mail and other forms of international communication and news cover-
age remained intact throughout the crisis. Although a few Westerners
in various parts of China were roughed up and spat on, none were
killed or seriously injured.
Several Western journalists insisted that the riots were planned and
orchestrated by the Chinese government, but this is untrue. With a few
notable exceptions, Western print and media journalists do not under-
stand China and greatly underestimate the depth of patriotic and
nationalistic feeling there today. They come close to libeling the
Chinese people as mindless automatons who do not express outrage
at Western atrocities unless their government tells them to do so. The
anti-NATO riots were in fact almost completely spontaneous, and
the Chinese government did not organize or orchestrate them; facilitate
might be a better word. That is, the government decided to go along
