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Yesterday the Serbian newspaper Politics published a letter of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who arrived in the country on Wednesday as part of an official visit to Europe. In the letter, among other things, the Chinese president recalled, on the day of its 25th anniversary, the bombing by NATO of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, in which three people died.
The bombing occurred as part of NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo, which began in 1999 and was justified by the need to put an end to a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbs led by Slobodan Milošević against the Muslim population of Albanian origin in Kosovo . The bombing of the Chinese embassy, which the United States claims was by mistake, has over the years become an important element of Chinese nationalism and the government’s anti-Western rhetoric. “The friendship between China and Serbia was forged with the blood of our compatriots, which will remain in the shared memory of our two peoples,” Xi Jinping wrote in the letter.
The NATO operation against Serbia began on the evening of March 24, 1999: 80 jets belonging to Canada, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, the United States, Italy, and then the US and British warships deployed bombings and missile launches against the country began in the Adriatic. In a first phase, Serbian radars and air defense installations north of Pristina (the capital of Kosovo) and around Belgrade were attacked. The second phase of the conflict began on March 27 and was aimed at the destruction of the Serbian armed forces. On April 23, the NATO allies meeting in Washington decided to intensify the attacks and thus began the third and final phase of the war. The bombings were also directed at non-strictly military targets such as power plants, bridges, aqueducts, fuel depots, radios and televisions.
On the night between May 7 and May 8, five bombs dropped by US warplanes hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Three Chinese journalists were killed (Xu Xinghu, 31 years old, Zhu Ying, 27 years old, Shao Yunhuan, 48 years old) and around twenty people were injured.
That night it was told on the BBC by Shen Hong, a Chinese businessman who was in Belgrade and who arrived on site shortly after the explosions. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was burning, officials and employees were trying to get out of the windows covered in blood and dust and those on the upper floors had knotted curtains to be able to climb down: «We couldn’t enter. There was a lot of smoke, there was no electricity and we couldn’t see anything. It was horrible,” Shen Hong said.
The bombing of the Chinese embassy generated enormous controversy, both because China was a country not involved in the conflict, and because attacking an embassy is a very serious act, given that international law guarantees protection to diplomatic offices.
Before long, two conflicting narratives began to emerge. China immediately spoke of an intentional act by the United States. Months later two European newspapers, one English and one Danish, they suggested that the bombings had been planned because the CIA had discovered that the diplomatic headquarters of the People’s Republic was being used as a communications base by Milosevic’s armed forces. Other newspapers and investigations, including one from New York Times, denied the thesis of the deliberate act and confirmed that it had instead been an error. It was also the thesis put forward, right from the start, by the President of the United States Bill Clinton and by NATO, whose spokesperson gave one of the first explanations of what had happened: the war planes, he said from the podium of the press conference, had «hit the wrong building.”
It took more than a month for the United States to provide China with a full explanation: a series of mapping errors had led to five GPS-guided bombs hitting the Chinese embassy, but the real target would have been the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement (FDSP), a state agency that imported and exported defense equipment and was located about 350 meters from China’s diplomatic headquarters.
In those days, the United States and NATO were already at the center of criticism and pressure due to the high number of civilians killed in a bombing campaign conducted without the authorization of the United Nations and strongly opposed by China and Russia. With the bombing of the embassy, the United States and NATO, due to a mapping error, had attacked the diplomatic headquarters of one of the members of the UN National Security Council, the one who had most opposed the air campaign in Serbia .
China said the explanations provided were not convincing, the government spoke of a “barbaric” and “criminal act”, and of NATO’s “hypocrisy”.
A US serviceman inspects damage caused to the US embassy building in Beijing on May 10, following attacks by Chinese protesters against NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (HO/HB Hays)
After the bombing, large protests began in China, directly supported by the government: in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities in China. In the center of Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, the residence of the US consul was set on fire. There were also demonstrations and protests by Chinese communities in various countries around the world.
At the end of 1999, relations between the United States and China gradually began to improve again. After an official apology, the US government decided in August to pay $4.5 million to the families of the three Chinese citizens killed. On December 16, the governments of the two countries reached an agreement under which the United States agreed to pay $28 million in compensation for damage to the Chinese embassy facility and China in turn agreed to pay $2.87 million. million dollars for damage caused during protests at the US diplomatic headquarters in Beijing.
In 2017, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was transformed into a Chinese Cultural Center.
A statue of Confucius in front of the Chinese Cultural Center in Belgrade, Serbia, April 29, 2024 (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)