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