In June 1999, as a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I went on a State of Washington trade mission to Vladivostok, Manchuria and Beijing. My interest was not so much trade as to talk to Chinese about the recent U.S. bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, which the U.S. government said was an accident, and which many Chinese believed was not. I was able to interview Chinese students in Harbin, and wrote about our conversations for the P-I and also for Liberty. This is from Liberty, October 1999. 

         The uniformed customs officer at Suifenhe, Manchuria, squinted at the red stamp in my passport. It proclaimed I was a journalist with permission to enter the People’s Republic of China. He mumbled something later translated as, “Hmph. I see we’re letting them in again.”

         He stamped me in, June 19, 1999.

         I was part of a State of Washington delegation looking at a proposed container shipping route from Northeast China through Russia to the U.S. West Coast. I had a second interest: to talk politics with Chinese.

         Our trade delegation had meetings and banquets every day with mayors, provincial vice-governors and department heads of this, that and the other. Only one of them mentioned Kosovo. He said, “Let’s not talk about Kosovo,” and we obliged him.

         But I wanted to talk about it. And though I was only in China nine days, and was in buses, hotel rooms or banquets most of the time, I talked to a number of students and also a train passenger, a man at breakfast, a taxi driver, a truck driver, a bus driver, an employee of a Danish company, an employee of Americans, two employees of the China’s government news agency and my privately hired translator. 

 

         Every one of them opposed the war in Yugoslavia. Only the handful who worked for foreigners were prepared to consider that the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade might have been an accident. The others said that was impossible.

         “The American map can’t be wrong,” one student said.

         “America has the best technology in the world,” another said. “How can it be just a mistake?”

         I said, “Most Americans don’t believe the bombing was on purpose. What would you say if it really was a mistake?”

         “Then track down the criminal who did it,” a woman said.

         These were students at Harbin Institute of Technology, where I went with the translator. She took me to the the cafeteria, where I wandered among tables of students busy with rice, noodles and private conversations. I’d pick a table, sit and start talking. Later, when the cafeteria emptied out, I went to a bulletin board outside, addressed a group in English, and started talking some more, backed up by my interpreter.

         In the cafeteria, I controlled who I talked to, and talked a lot to women; in the group outside, I was the hub of a knot of students, most of them men.

         My second question to them was: If you think the bombing was on purpose, what was the purpose?

         I heard four theories.

         First, because China opposed the war against Yugoslavia. To force China into line, America attacked the Chinese embassy.

         Second, because of Taiwan. America used the cover of war to reminder China not to attack its client.

         Third, as a test. Under the cover of war, America attacked the embassy to see if China would stand up for itself. When the test was over, it said, “Sorry.” 

         Fourth was the I-don’t-know theory: The truth will come out someday. “Like the JFK assassination,” one student said.

 

         Clearly these Chinese didn’t understand America. We are the country that screwed up Jimmy Carter’s rescue mission in the Iranian desert. We executed the missile-bombing of an innocent pill factory in the Sudan. We act boldly, on bad intelligence. We are the people who coined the aphorisms, “Garbage in, garbage out,” “Close enough for government work,” and that incomparable bumper sticker, “Shit happens.”

         That was essentially what we told the Chinese: “Shit happens. We’re real sorry, but we’ve got a war on.”

         I was there six weeks later. The students weren’t throwing rocks, but they were still sore. They didn’t accept Clinton’s apology; they didn’t want to accept it. Even if, secretly, they thought his explanation might be true, it would still irritate them. That Americans would be this sloppy with the their embassy, not some other embassy, but theirs, was another sign of disrespect.

         More disrespect was revealed when Americans dismissed their riots as government-sponsored and their opinions as the braying of a government-controlled press. This angered the students, too. It was laughable, they said, for Americans to say they had rioted on government order. Their anger was real.

         “The American press doesn’t want people to think seriously,” a student said.

         The Chinese media is no paragon of objectivity. Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, had denied there was any “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo before the war started. But the U.S. press had just as clearly pumped up the limited stock of atrocities.

         A Chinese student in Harbin, who had followed the U.S. press through the Voice of America and in Chinese translation, told me, “The American media always supports the government.”

         In fact, it usually does. It may be free, but it can still be the government’s poodle. I recalled all the strained comparisons to Hitler, and the cover of Newsweek with a close-up of Slobodan Milosevic with the cover line, “The Face of Evil.”

         Usually I’ll stack the U.S. media against the Chinese media any day. When we’re at war and they’re not, I’m not so sure.

         I had to admit that the Chinese had reason to feel disrespected by the United States. It was plain that the U.S. government didn’t give a dog’s biscuit whether China opposed the war. China is one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: We and our Security Council buddies, Britain and France, had traipsed on over to NATO and started a war without so much as a what-do-you-think from Russia and China. The little countries of the world expect that sort of thing. They’re used to it. Russia and China take it differently.

         The Chinese are deeply nationalistic. Like Americans they feel themselves a part of a big, important country, a country with nuclear weapons, a country with a future, a country that counts.

         Thoughtful Chinese admit their problems. A Beijing woman told me, “We have human rights problems. But we are improving. During the Cultural Revolution, we could not say anything against the government. Now we can say what we think, though sometimes we cannot be heard by the leaders.”

     In Beijing I talked to a retiree with long experience in the United States as bureau chief for Xinhua. “The United States never treats us on an equal footing,” he said. “On human rights, you say you have the right to interfere in other countries. But can you permit China to interfere in American human-rights 

 

problems? No.”

         And he said, “On human rights we can learn from you. But you have no right to teach us.”

 

         China’s complaint about the United States runs deeper than the recent war. It’s the whole American attitude toward power.

         That attitude was expressed succintly by an American with whom I was discussing the war, as we both strolled down a shopping street in Harbin. He supported the war. He said, “We have the power. How can we stand by and let this happen?”

         Americans have a tin ear for how imperious this sounds. We are the ones who decide whether to “let this happen” in somebody else’s country. What gives us that right?

         Because we have the power.

         We clothe the naked reality of this two ways: first, by talking a lot about our good intentions. We are the humanitarian with the sword; when others complain about our use of that sword, we remind them how humanitarian we are.

         But you’ve got a sword.

         Well, yes; we have to, unfortunately. But (here comes our second distraction) we’re not doing this alone. We’ve got allies. We fight all our important wars with allies, and when we can, as NATO or the U.N. That way, we’re on the side of Humanity.

         China finds this idea threatening. It’s like somebody forming a gang and starting to heave rocks through the neighbor’s windows. It doesn’t want to join the gang, because the gang is clearly run by the Americans. It doesn’t want to fight the gang; it fought such a gang in Korea and bloodied its nose. And it doesn’t need a gang to protect itself.

         The Chinese accuse the Americans of “hegemony,” a harsh, Marxist-sounding word that means the domination of other nations. Americans recoil; we’re not trying to dominate people. We’re trying to do good.

         “You Americans attack Serbia to protect the other side,” a student said. “A heroic dream. Sounds very perfect. You Americans have the habit of being the hero.”

         We are the heroes. We devise a political settlement for the Kosovar Albanians, dubbing it the “peace accord” and announcing that if the Serbs do not accept it, we will bomb them into submission.

         I was working in Hong Kong in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Americans on the staff all began talking: What are we going to do? The Aussies and Kiwis didn’t talk like that. Nor did the Indians and Filipinos. Only the Americans. They assumed that their country would have to Do Something. It always had.

 

         Perhaps in the next century China will start thinking that way, too, and become a hegemonic power. Lots of Americans, starting with Sen. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, think hegemony is China’s goal. It is certainly the goal of some Chinese, perhaps those who stole U.S. nuclear secrets. At the moment, however, China is not in a position to challenge the United States in war.

         It is America’s interest that China become a bourgeois nation, fat and satisfied rather than lean and angry. It is in our interest that China be joined to the world rather than cut off, tied by its investments here, and ours there; by trade and patents and treaties; by its students in our universities—already 47,000 of them in the United States.

         In China’s leadership are two factions. Vice Premier Zhu Rongji, leader of the economic progressives, visited the United States in April, and offered a package of concessions for Chinese membership to the World Trade Organization. Clinton rejected the offer but leaked its contents. He almost immediately changed his mind, but Zhu could not come tail-wagging back to Washington. He returned to China empty-handed and came under criticism that he had given away the store. Then came the embassy bombing, which the anti-WTO faction used to full effect.

         The WTO is a litmus test. It represents world prices, intellectual property rights and international standards. Zhu’s faction wants it as a battering ram to break down the walls of state industry. His opponents want to save state industry by keeping the WTO out.

         I saw the same division among ordinary Chinese. Most supported entry into the WTO: it represented China growing up. The WTO was like the Internet: This is what modern nations have, so they want it.

         The pro-WTO Chinese also tended to be the most friendly to the Americans. “Most Chinese think the U.S. should be our friend,” said one student.

         There were others, though, who wanted the WTO only on condition that China was treated fairly—not, said a Beijing man, as “a sweet snack” to compensate for bad deeds.

         Others opposed the WTO deal. The Xinhua man said, “I read the full text of what the American leaders say they almost agreed to. These conditions are too harsh.”

         A student said, “I will go to America to study, but I will never serve the Americans. This event confirms that I will return to my own country.”

         A taxi driver who said, “Mao would not put up with this. China fought back in the Korean War.”

         Which faction does the United States want to encourage? That of the taxi driver, or the student who told me, “We don’t want to have a war with you. We want balance and equality.”

         The more Bill Clinton tries to play Woodrow Wilson, the more he proves the taxi driver right. 

         America can influence China through our business and culture, but cannot dictate to China on anything fundamental. China is too big, and already too strong. It will become what it will become.

         I left China optimistic about that. Perhaps it was because I was in Beijing then, in a high-rise hotel two blocks from a Starbucks and a Dairy Queen. My hotel overlooked a freeway that got clogged with traffic twice a day, just like the freeway at home. Below my window was a pedestrian overpass; if I got up early enough in the morning, I could see it lined solid with human figures under blankets.

         They were not living in cardboard hovels, and they were not beggars. By midmorning they were packed up and gone, somewhere in the city seeking their future.

 

©1999 Bruce Ramsey