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with the gathering protest movements rather than risk resisting them
and thereby inflaming antigovernment as well as antiforeign senti-
ment. Popular uprisings in China are very frequently two-edged
swords that can cut against the government as well as foreign indig-
nities. The Boxer Uprising of 1899 and 1900 was originally antidynas-
tic until the Qing government coopted it, redirecting popular
indignation away from itself and toward Western powers and their
embassies. The anti-NATO riots of May 1999 did not start out as anti-
government protests, but they easily could have turned against the
Chinese government if it had been seen as being too soft on NATO or
condemning of the outburst of antiforeign sentiment. So Chinese
government officials went along with the protestors to some extent,
appearing on television to express understanding of their indignation
but warning them to maintain order. In Beijing the government pro-
vided buses for protestors to ride to the American and British embas-
sies, where Chinese security forces permitted vandalism of embassy
property but thwarted attempts to storm the embassy compounds.
The Chinese government had wisely released a safety valve, and
within a few days the entire crisis had dissipated and life went back
to normal. Jiang Zemin and his core leadership group parried a poten-
tial crisis for their government and walked, with calm and finesse, a
delicate tightrope between alienating Western business interests in
China on the one hand and alienating the enraged and nationalistic
Chinese masses on the other.
In Beijing, many of the very same students who had hurled brick
shards at the U.S. embassy a few days earlier soon lined up there to
obtain their student visas to study at American universities. The
majority of them harbored secret plans to remain permanently in the
United States. (Fewer than one-third of the Chinese students who go
to America ever return to China.) Their brickbat-and-visa relationship
with the American embassy reflected the larger comic complexity of
young Chinese intellectuals' love-hate attitude toward the United
States: the America that had enraged them a few days before was
now doing them a favor. The same might be said of the Chinese
government, for which the anti-NATO protests could not have come
at a more opportune time. In May 1999, the 10th anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square Massacre was looming on the horizon, and nerv-
ous Chinese government officials were contemplating various ways
of maintaining June 4, 1999, as just another ordinary day. The anti-
NATO riots were exactly the distraction the Chinese government
needed, and the critical date passed in Beijing and elsewhere in China
without commemoration, gathering, or comment.
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