China Puts Gas on the Fire

As of Monday, China’s state-controlled media had not told the public that President Clinton had apologized and expressed his profound sorrow for the unintentional bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade. Nor had it reported anything in the seven weeks since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia about the horrors of President Slobodan Milosevic’s policy of murder, rape and expulsion of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, confining itself instead to stories on the airstrikes.

This is part of the background to the violent anti-American protests in Beijing and wherever else in China that the United States maintains diplomatic missions--demonstrations that Chinese authorities have done much to incite, little to regulate and nothing to halt.

Saturday’s attack on the embassy in Belgrade was an inexcusable intelligence blunder that originated with the Central Intelligence Agency’s reliance on outdated maps and then was blindly endorsed by every level of higher authority that reviewed the CIA’s targeting information. At the proper time, compensation should be paid for the tragic consequences of that mistake, which killed three Chinese and injured a score of others.

But to outrageously claim, as China’s state press has done, that the embassy bombing was a deliberate “sneak attack” is to force matters well beyond the bounds of legitimate anger and indignation. China is a country where bitter memories of past foreign insults and humiliations are always close to the surface. What’s obvious now is that the government is playing on those resentments to try to gain a moral advantage and rally popular support for its authority, just weeks before world attention is drawn to the 10th anniversary of the regime’s bloody repression of the Tiananmen Square political protests.

The embassy bombing has allowed hard-liners among China’s rulers to ride high. Never comfortable with the policy of developing closer ties with the United States and others in the West, they have now been handed their strongest excuse in many years for insisting on a tougher anti-American line and forcing their more moderate colleagues, like President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, onto the defensive.

The consequences could be far-reaching. Beijing needs no reminding that the United States has its own list of grievances, involving China’s human rights abuses, threats against Taiwan, prohibited missile technology exports to troublemaking countries and a woefully lopsided bilateral trade balance. Tensions have now been further raised by allegations of Chinese nuclear espionage against the United States going back many years.

With or without the tragedy of the Belgrade embassy bombing, bilateral relations had been heading toward a difficult time. The bombing and the protests against it fueled by Chinese government propaganda have only accelerated and deepened that trend.