回望20年前的貝爾格萊德“五八事件”_風聞

BBC網站5月7日刊登調查新聞《美國轟炸中國使館的那天晚上》

文：Kevin Ponniah & Lazara Marinkovic

譯：Kris

那天晚上午夜時分，塞爾維亞工程師弗拉達急匆匆地趕往他在貝爾格萊德的公寓。早些時候他帶着20歲的兒子一起出門，但在南斯拉夫首都不論走到哪裏都是滿天傾瀉而下的炸彈。電網癱瘓，他想回家。

自1999年3月下旬以來，全世界最強大的軍事聯盟北約不斷髮動空襲，試圖阻止南聯盟總統斯洛博丹·米洛舍維奇對科索沃省阿爾巴尼亞族人的暴行。現在時間來到了5月7日，美國主導的空襲行動愈演愈烈。

近幾周來，每當空襲警報開始嘶鳴時，弗拉達全家便與其它人一起，瑟縮在公寓大樓的地下室裏，祈禱不會有打偏的導彈擊中他們的家。

有人認為他們是幸運的，因為他們就住在中國大使館旁邊，而後者是具有重要地位的外交使團。躲在中國使館旁邊必定能保得周全。

就在弗拉達和兒子摸黑接近公寓樓玻璃門的時候，美國B-2隱形戰機正掠過貝爾格萊德上空。它們已經根據座標精確鎖定了打擊目標，而這個目標是美國中央情報局選中並確認過的。説時遲那時快，一枚導彈劃空而過，在弗拉達耳中留下尖鋭的呼嘯聲。炸碎的門和玻璃向外飛濺，根本來不及躲開。

“第一枚炸彈的衝擊力把我們從地面拋起來，然後跌下去……接着一個又一個（的炸彈落下來）——砰、砰、砰。整個建築羣所有的百葉窗都被衝擊波撕開，所有的窗户都被震碎了。”

他們害怕但沒有受傷。五枚炸彈都全部擊中了100米外的中國駐南聯盟大使館。

美國和北約在未經聯合國授權的情況下進行狂轟濫炸，導致大量平民傷亡，已經引發中國和俄羅斯的強烈反對以及國際社會的密切監督。現在，他們又在巴爾幹半島心臟地帶襲擊了象徵中國主權的使館。

從窗户撤離現場的使館工作人員

在貝爾格萊德的另一端，消息靈通的中國商人沈洪（音）被告知大使館遭到襲擊。他一開始拒絕相信這個消息。就在幾天前，他父親從上海打電話來時，還開玩笑地説兒子你應該把新買的奔馳車停在使館大樓前以確保安全。

“我打電話給警隊裏的熟人，他説，‘是的，沈，它真的被擊中了’。他還説趕緊過來，那時我才確信這事真的發生在現實中。”

沈洪來到使館時，滿眼狼藉。使館着火後不斷燃燒；滿身是血和塵土的工作人員正爬出窗户逃生。與米洛舍維奇（他兩週前被國際法庭指控犯有反人類罪）關係緊密的南聯盟政客也抵達現場，譴責爆炸事件是北約野蠻行徑的最新例證。

沈洪回憶道：“我們進不去。煙太濃，又沒有電，什麼都看不見。那情形太可怕了！”

沈洪（音）在慘案中失去了兩位密友：許杏虎和朱穎

沈洪突然發現了一位他認識的使館文化專員，他把窗簾布系在一起，從二樓窗户爬了出來。“我們沒看到他身上的傷，他自己也沒注意到。直到跟他握手後才發現我手上全是血。我跟他説‘你負傷了，你負傷了！’他看到我手上的血時昏了過去。“

第二天，沈洪得知自己的兩位密友——新婚燕爾的記者許杏虎（31歲）和朱穎（27歲）——居住的宿舍被炸彈擊中，當場犧牲。他們的屍體在一堵倒塌的牆下被發現。

兩人都是《光明日報》的編輯。許杏虎是畢業自北京外國語大學，講一口流利的塞爾維亞語，他寫過一系列記錄貝爾格萊德生活的特別報道，取名為《親歷炮火》。

朱穎在該報的廣告部擔任美術編輯。她母親在得知女兒死訊時悲痛得昏厥過去，被送往醫院；朱父獨自前往貝爾格萊德看遺體。

第三名記者、新華社的邵雲環（48歲）也在空襲中犧牲了。她的丈夫曹榮飛眼睛受重傷有失明危險。另一名使館軍事專員在被運送回國時一直處於昏迷狀態。此番轟炸總共造成三人死亡，至少20人受傷。

在沈洪看來，這就是戰爭行為。第二天，他高舉標語“北約：納粹美國的恐怖組織”，走上貝爾格萊德街頭進行抗議。

這句標語頗能反映後來事態的發展。

犧牲的三名記者（左起）：邵雲環、許杏虎、朱穎

***

轟炸發生後的數小時內，出現了兩種彼此矛盾的説法。這兩種敍事在接下來幾個月內逐漸固化，並構成了圍繞着該事件爭議的基礎——而它直到今天仍然是中美關係當中揮之不去的陰霾。

北約的轟炸引發了種種猜測，人們將其中許多懸疑之處拼湊在一起，暗示事件背後有個巨大的陰謀。陰謀論持續籠罩着該事件，幾個月之後，歐洲兩家備受尊敬的報社刊文稱空襲是預先策劃好的。

但許多北約前官員表示，儘管幾乎所有中國人都堅信不是誤炸，但20年來沒有確鑿證據可以支持這種觀點。而且美國也極力否認轟炸是蓄意行為。

炸彈落地後數小時內，美國和北約便連忙宣佈該事件屬於意外。而同時中國駐聯合國代表則開始對“戰爭罪”和“野蠻行徑”表示譴責。

當天晚上，這場戰爭的代言人——北約發言人傑米·謝伊——在布魯塞爾的牀上被喚醒，並被告知次日一早須要面對全世界新聞媒體。當時他掌握的信息並不多，但他對該事件做出了最早的解釋，並表示歉意。他在記者會的講台上説，轟炸機“打擊了錯誤的建築物。”

20年後，謝伊表示：“這就像火車或汽車事故——你知道發生了什麼，但你不知道原因在哪裏。很久之後才能還原真相……但有一件事從一開始就很明確，那就是打擊外國大使館不在北約計劃之內。”

朱穎的父親在貝爾格萊德見到女兒遺體

直到一個多月之後，美國才給出一個完整的解釋：美國犯了一系列低級錯誤，導致五枚由全球定位系統制導的導彈炸彈打擊了中國大使館——其中一枚穿過使館主樓旁邊的大使住所，所幸沒有爆炸。

按照美國官員的説法，真正的轟炸目標是南聯盟軍需供應採購局總部——該政府機構負責南聯盟國防設備的進出口事務。灰色的辦公樓今天仍然矗立在那裏，距中國大使館遺址有數百米之遠。

北約最初希望在數日內結束轟炸行動，逼迫米洛舍維奇放棄，將其部隊撤出科索沃地區，並允許維和人員進入。但到中國大使館被炸時，空襲已經持續了六個多星期。為維持空中打擊強度，北約急於尋找數以百計的新目標，這時，通常不參與目標選擇的中情局加入其中，並決定對南聯盟軍需供應採購局進行打擊。

可是，作為美國最頂尖的情報機構，中情局竟然聲稱它使用了一張錯誤的地圖。

美國國防部長威廉·科恩在轟炸案發生兩天後説道：“簡單來説情況就是，因為轟炸指令是基於過時的地圖，我們的一架飛機襲擊了錯誤的目標。”他指的是美國政府使用的一張地圖，上面把中國大使館和南聯盟軍需供應採購局的位置都標錯了。

關於南聯盟軍需供應採購局，美國情報人員掌握的全部信息就是一個地址：藝術大街2號，估測其座標時也僅僅採用了最基礎的軍事測量技術。中情局局長喬治·特尼特後來表示，當時採用的測量方式十分不精確，根本不應用來挑選轟炸目標。

特尼特還説，無獨有偶，情報和軍事數據庫的交叉檢查也沒有發現錯誤，因為它們沒有更新中國大使館的地址，儘管事實上許多美國外交官曾經出入過該建築。

任何人只要去過現場，就會發現那是一個有大門的院子，裏面有棟五層高的青瓦坡屋頂建築，門口銅匾上清楚地寫着這是中國大使館，10米高處還飄揚着鮮豔的五星紅旗。

許多人認為中情局的解釋不足取信：全世界最先進的軍隊對聯合國常任理事國、北約空襲行動最堅定的反對者進行了轟炸，給出的理由是地圖錯誤。中國絲毫不相信這種説法，認為其“不具説服力”。

中國外交部長李肇星告訴專程赴北京解釋該事件的美國特使：“中國政府和人民不能接受誤炸的結論。”

可美國為什麼要蓄意攻擊中國呢？

***

1999年5月8日，星期六，日出後不久，美國駐北京外交官大衞·蘭克爬起牀，打開電視，轉到CNN頻道。電視裏播放着貝爾格萊德黑夜裏中國大使館悶燃的現場照片。

他知道，到下午時分，門外將聚集數千名憤怒的中國人抗議示威。但此刻的蘭克還比較冷靜，他打電話給政治部門的上司，説：“你知道，吉姆，這是最糟糕的事。”

蘭克連忙從住所趕往美國使館，美方官員正試圖瞭解昨晚發生的事情。人們知道出了大事，但這件事必須是、只能是一個悲劇性的錯誤。

蘭克説：“顯而易見，它是一場戰爭迷霧式的意外事故……因此那時候我根本沒料到後來會發展出這麼大的問題。它當然是件大事，但沒想到它會是一個引起全面震動的重大事件。”

在接下來的幾個小時裏，中國政府和中國人民的反應變得越來越明確。

蘭克開始接到中國自由派朋友的電話，他們對轟炸事件感到震怒。美國在華記者們也接到了類似的電話，中國的親美人士紛紛向他們致電表達震驚和背叛感。

這時，中國官方媒體已經開始對事件進行定性闡述：美國轟炸中國外交使館的行為，已經違反了國際法。蘭克説：“太多太多中國人對我説着一模一樣的話。幾乎一字不差地傳達着他們真實的憤怒。”

到那天下午，數千學生走上北京街頭，聚集在美國大使館外。事情很快變得暴力。

“他們撿起鋪路的石頭——北京的人行道有的地方沒鋪好，他們把磚塊扒起來，從牆頭扔向館內。”

許多石塊砸穿了使館建築物的玻璃窗，裏面藏着包括美國大使尚慕傑（詹姆斯·薩塞）在內的十多名工作人員。使館汽車遭到了破壞和襲擊。

中國人傳達的消息很清楚：美國是故意轟炸的。一幅標語上寫着“血債血償”。抗議活動持續到第二天，更多人（有報道稱10萬人）衝擊了北京外交區，向英國和美國大使館投擲石塊、油漆、雞蛋和混凝土塊。

美國駐華使館發言人比爾·帕爾默當時被困在其中一棟樓裏，他説：“感覺我們成了人質。”

中國已經很久沒爆發過這種規模的示威。政府必須保持平衡，既讓公眾表達憤慨感情，又維持公共秩序。

時任國家副主席的胡錦濤罕見地發表電視講話，表示政府“堅決支持、依法保護一切符合法律規定的抗議活動”，但也告誡抗議者必須“依法有序地進行”活動。

美國駐華大使尚慕傑四天沒有出門

爆發抗議活動的不止北京。那個週末，抗議者也走上了上海等城市的街頭。美國駐成都領事的住所被人焚燒了。

時年18歲的秦偉平（音）是廣州航海學院的學生領袖。他説，示威者不知道北約已經為它所説的意外事故道了歉，因此每個年輕人都感到憤怒，一心想着上街去抗議美國。

他説，一開始他的同學們接到的統治是必須留在宿舍裏。但轟炸事件發生的24小時後，學校領導告訴他，美國領事館周圍的街道上一共允許3萬名學生參與示威，其中給了航海學院500個名額。

怒火中燒的學生們以抽籤的方式決定誰可以參加抗議活動。有公共汽車來接他們，有人給他們一份符合官方口徑的聲明教他們照着讀。秦偉平説：“他們寫的句子太長了，在街上很難大聲喊出長句子。” 他決定改成吶喊口號，批判邪惡的北約和美國。

“我們年輕人就是感到很憤怒，情緒像海浪一樣噴湧而出，”現居美國的秦偉平回憶道。

大衞·蘭克認為，這種憤怒的情感是真實的。他説：“如果説這種憤怒是政府製造出來的產物，那是侮辱了中國人。他們真的非常憤慨。” 

自90年代初以來，中國加強了愛國主義教育。教科書和課堂的主流敍事都是，中國作為偉大而仁愛的文明，近代遭受了西方列強蹂躪。駐南聯盟大使館被炸事件符合這樣的敍事。

曼徹斯特大學中國政治學教授、中國民族主義專家彼得·格里斯説：“我認為需要結合歷史背景來理解普通中國百姓的憤怒，他們對西方存在一種社會化的反感。”

以對美國強硬觀點而聞名的解放軍大校劉明福認為，轟炸使館事件是美國一系列“反華冷戰”行徑的一部分。

“這完全是蓄意轟炸。這是一次有目的性、有計劃的轟炸，不是什麼意外，”他説。

中國從美國獲得了2800萬美元賠償金，其中又還回300萬美元用於賠償美國駐華使領館財產損失。美國又向遇難者家屬和負傷人員賠償了450萬美元。

***

轟炸當天，倡導民族和解的南斯拉夫學者杜桑·詹尼奇在貝爾格萊德市中心一家高檔餐廳與好友共進午餐。

這位友人是中國大使館的武官任寶凱。詹尼奇表示，他坦言中國在監視北約和美國的行動，並追蹤戰機動向。任寶凱邀請他當晚去使館吃飯，因為他知道詹尼奇喜歡中國菜。

詹尼奇回憶道：“當時我開玩笑地説。‘得了吧，你們會被轟炸的！我才不去！’”他只是説着玩，根本沒想到大使館真的會受到襲擊。

當天晚上詹尼奇沒法在使館吃完飯，當導彈飛進使館大樓時，任寶凱被衝擊波拋向天花板，然後跌進了彈坑，直到第二天早上昏迷的他才在地下室裏被發現。

共有五枚炸彈擊中使館區域，一枚未爆炸

轟炸事件發生五個月後，1999年10月，英國的《觀察家報》和丹麥的《政治報》刊文稱，中國武官所説的監視行動可能是美國蓄意轟炸的動機。

兩家報紙援引北約線人的消息稱，大使館被南斯拉夫軍隊當作通信轉播站，因此被北約從禁止攻擊的目標名單中刪除。美國國務卿馬德琳·奧爾布賴特譴責這個報道是“一派胡言”，英國外交大臣羅賓·庫克則表示，“完全沒有一絲一毫的證據”來支持這種説法。

但二十年後，丹麥《政治報》1995至2004年駐巴爾幹地區特派記者揚斯·霍爾索和當年《觀察家報》的記者約翰·斯威尼都表示，他們堅持認為轟炸是蓄意進行的。

霍爾索説，他最初展開調查的原因是中情局局長喬治·特尼特的公開聲明，後者説衞星圖像沒有標明該目標是大使館，稱其“沒有旗幟，沒有標識，沒有明顯的記號”——但其實三者都存在。

他表示，自己的消息來源是一名丹麥軍方高級官員，他幾乎準備公開確認轟炸是蓄意而為。“然後他突然反悔了，説如果自己再向我透露一個字，他不僅會被開除而且還會遭到起訴。”

霍爾索聲稱，當時塞爾維亞武裝顯然與中國之間有軍事合作，他親眼看到當地軍車進出中國大使館。美國官員告訴《紐約時報》，轟炸後他們瞭解到該使館是中國在歐洲收集情報的重要平台。

倖存下來的任寶凱後來被授予少將軍銜。他稱自己已經退休，拒絕了BBC的採訪請求。

同樣經歷了空襲的中國駐南斯拉夫聯邦大使潘佔林在著作《戰火中的外交官》裏否認大使館參與了通信轉播，也否認了中國獲得塞爾維亞軍隊擊落的美國F-117隱形戰機部件的傳言。

有人認為，中國拿到了F-117的部件，對其進行了技術研究。還有人猜測，中國利用北約空襲的機會測試了反隱形技術。

但即便這些傳言是真的，仍然有個地方説不通：美國難道真的甘願冒險蓄意轟炸中國大使館？

就連前南政府的內部人士也沒有形成共識。一名前南軍事情報官員告訴BBC，他認為那場轟炸是蓄意而為，中情局的解釋十分荒謬；但另一位退休上校則聲稱，他相信美國給出的解釋。

前北約發言人傑米·謝伊表示：“當發生不好的事情時，每個人都認為肯定有某種隱情—— 不是出岔子，而是有預謀。我認為這是胡説八道，那就是誤讀地圖，是一次糟糕的錯誤。”

***

四月下旬一個陽光明媚的日子裏，紀念石上的十幾束鮮花排列得很整齊，但沈洪仍覺得必須重新整理一下花束。他會定期來到使館被炸的現場，紀念他死去的友人。不過現在，來這裏的人不止他一個。

每天都有大批中國遊客來這裏參觀紀念館和矗立在附近的孔子雕像。

一對年輕的中國夫婦在貝爾格萊德度蜜月，他們決定參觀紀念館。他們與許杏虎和朱穎1999年犧牲時的年齡差不多。妻子説：“有三名同胞死在這裏。我們從小就知道這件事，所以過來看看。”

一位楊姓導遊帶着大約30名中年遊客進行為期兩週的巴爾幹半島大巴游，他説大使館遺址是中國遊客們必選的一站。“美國人毀了我們的大使館，每個中國人都知道。”

大使館舊址變成了歐洲最大的中國文化中心之一

1999年的中國，還沒有成長為今天這個經濟、技術和軍事巨人。它把重心放在致富上，外交上不那麼引人注目。時隔20年，中國很清楚它已經具備與美國分庭抗禮的資格，其全球雄心已經反映了這一點。

貝爾格萊德大使館遺址被改造成了歐洲規模最大的中國文化中心。它的象徵意義不容忽略：這裏曾經上演西方帶來的恥辱和悲劇，而今脱胎換骨成為中國輝煌歷史的殿堂。

這也顯示，中國不準備忘卻那場轟炸，因為它中國可以把美國描繪成一個準備傷害中國的帝國主義超級大國。外國駐華外交官員表示，中國不時還會提起這件事。

但即便是那些當年呼籲中國立即採取報復行動的人，現在也意識到中國的反應沒有失控是件多麼值得慶幸的事。在抗議期間，沒有造成美國人員死亡，達成賠償協議之後，中國或多或少還是讓這件事過去了。

隨着另一批遊客來到紀念館前，沈洪表示：“我們是發展最快的國家，每年經濟以兩位數增長。如果當年打起仗來終止了這種發展勢頭，那將是多麼巨大的損失。”

“我的本性是個很激進的人。屬於能動手就不動口的那種。但回頭來看這件事，這麼做是對的。因為現在我們可以和美國人平起平坐了。”

The night the US bombed a Chinese embassy

It was close to midnight and Vlada, a Serbian engineer, was speeding towards his apartment in Belgrade. He had taken his 20-year-old son out that evening but bombs had started to fall across the Yugoslav capital. The power grid was down and he wanted to get home.

Nato, the world’s most powerful military alliance, had been pummelling Yugoslavia from the skies since late March to try to bring a halt to atrocities committed by President Slobodan Milosevic’s forces against ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. It was now 7 May 1999 and the US-dominated air campaign was only growing more intense.

Vlada’s family had spent many nights in recent weeks huddled with others in the basement of their apartment building as air raid sirens blared outside, praying that an errant missile wouldn’t strike their homes.

They were lucky, some thought, to live just next to the Chinese embassy - an important diplomatic mission. Being there would surely protect them.

But as Vlada and his son approached the glass doors of their building in the dark, US B-2 stealth warplanes were in the skies above Belgrade. They were locked-on to the precise co-ordinates of a target selected and cleared by the CIA. All Vlada heard at first was the whoosh of an incoming missile. There was no time to move. The doors shattered, spraying glass at them.

“The force of the first bomb lifted us off the ground and we fell… Then one after the other [more bombs landed] - bam, bam, bam. All the shutters on the block were ripped off by the blast, it broke all the windows.”

They were terrified but uninjured. All five bombs had hit the embassy, 100 metres away.

The US and Nato were already facing scrutiny over mounting civilian casualties in a bombing campaign conducted without UN authorisation and fiercely opposed by China and Russia. They had now attacked a symbol of Chinese sovereignty in the heart of the Balkans.

Across town, Shen Hong, a well-connected Chinese businessman, was getting word that the embassy had been hit. He refused to believe it. Just a few days earlier, his father had phoned from Shanghai and joked that his son should park his new Mercedes at the diplomatic compound to keep it safe.

“I called a policeman who I knew and he said, ‘Yes, Shen, it’s really hit’. He said come right away, so then I knew it was real, it was true.”

He arrived to a scene of chaos. The embassy was burning; workers covered in blood and dust were climbing out of windows to escape. Politicians close to Milosevic - who had been charged two weeks earlier with crimes against humanity by an international tribunal - were already arriving to denounce the bombing as the latest example of Nato barbarity.

“We could not go inside. There was a lot of smoke, there wasn’t any electricity and we couldn’t see anything. It was horrible,” said Shen.

He spotted the cultural attaché, a man he knew, who had knotted together curtains to get out of a first-floor window. “We didn’t see that he was injured and he didn’t notice it either. It was only when I shook his hand that I realised my hands were covered in blood. I told him ‘you’re injured, you’re injured!’ - but when he saw this he passed out.”

The next day Shen would learn that two close friends - newlywed journalists Xu Xinghu, 31, and Zhu Ying, 27 - had been killed by a bomb that hit the sleeping quarters of the embassy. Their bodies were found under a collapsed wall.

The pair had worked for the Guangming (Enlightenment) Daily - a communist party newspaper. Xu, a language graduate who spoke fluent Serbian, had chronicled life in Belgrade during the bombings in a series of special reports called “Living Under Gunfire”.

Zhu Ying worked as an art editor in the paper’s advertising department. Her mother collapsed with grief and was sent to hospital when she learned of her daughter’s death so Zhu’s father travelled alone to Belgrade to see the body.

A third journalist, 48-year-old Shao Yunhuan, of the Xinhua news agency, also died. Her husband, Cao Rongfei, was blinded. The embassy’s military attaché, who is believed to have run an intelligence cell from the building, was sent back to China in a coma. In total, three people were killed and at least 20 injured.

For Shen, this was an act of war. The next day he led a protest through the streets of Belgrade carrying a sign reading “NATO: Nazi American Terrorist Organisation”

It was a sign of what was to come.

***

Within hours of the bombing, two competing narratives began to emerge. They would harden over the coming months and form the basis of how the incident - which continues to linger over the US-China relationship - remains debated today.

The bombing fuelled speculation, and there was no shortage of unanswered questions and missing pieces that were put together by some to imply a grand conspiracy. Intrigue continued to hang over the incident and, months afterwards, two respected European newspapers suggested the strikes were by design.

But, as former Nato officials point out, in 20 years no clear evidence has come to light proving what almost all of China believes and America strenuously denies: that it was deliberate.

In those first hours after the bombs fell, the US and Nato wasted no time to announce that it was an accident. China’s representative at the UN, meanwhile, denounced a “crime of war” and a “barbarian act”.

In Brussels, Jamie Shea - the British Nato spokesman who became the public face of the war - was woken up in the middle of the night and told he would have to face the world’s press in the morning. The information available in those early hours was thin but he would give one of the first explanations of what had happened, along with an apology. The warplanes, he said from the briefing podium, had “struck the wrong building”.

“It’s like a train accident or a car crash - you know what has happened but what you don’t know is why it has happened,” he says 20 years later. “That took a lot longer to establish… But it was clear right from the get-go, that targeting a foreign embassy was not part of the Nato plan.”

It would take more than a month for the US to give Beijing a full explanation: that a series of basic errors had led to five GPS-guided bombs striking China’s embassy - including one that hurtled through the roof of the ambassador’s residence next to the main building but didn’t explode, likely sparing his life.

The real target, officials said, was the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement (FDSP) - a state agency that imported and exported defence equipment. The grey office building is still there today - hundreds of metres down the road from the embassy site.

Nato had initially hoped the bombing campaign would only last a few days until Milosevic gave up, pulled his forces out of Kosovo and allowed peacekeepers in. But by the time the embassy was hit it had stretched to more than six weeks. In the rush to find hundreds of new targets to sustain the aerial assault, the CIA, which was not normally involved in target-picking, had decided the FDSP should be struck.

But America’s premier intelligence agency said it had used a bad map.

“In simple terms, one of our planes attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map,” US defence secretary William Cohen said two days after the bombing. He was referring to a US government map that apparently did not show the correct location of the Chinese embassy nor the FDSP.

All US intelligence officers had was an address for the FDSP - 2 Bulevar Umetnosti - and a basic military navigation technique was used to approximate its co-ordinates. The technique used was so imprecise, CIA chief George Tenet later said, that it should never have been used to pick out a target for aerial bombing.

To compound the initial error, Tenet said, intelligence and military databases used to cross-check targets did not have the embassy’s new location listed, despite the fact that many US diplomats had actually been inside the building.

Had anyone on the ground visited the site to be bombed they would have found a gated compound, a five-storey building with a green-tiled oriental sloped roof, a bronze plaque announcing the embassy’s presence and a large, bright red Chinese flag fluttering more than 10 metres in the air.

The crux of the CIA’s explanation was hard for many to believe: the world’s most advanced military had bombed a fellow UN Security Council member and one of the most vocal opponents of the Nato air campaign because of a mapping error. China was having none of it. The story, it said, was “not convincing”.

“The Chinese government and people cannot accept the conclusion that the bombing was a mistake,” the foreign minister told a US envoy sent to Beijing in June 1999 to explain what had happened.

But why would the US intentionally attack China?

***

It wasn’t long after the Sun rose on the morning of Saturday, 8 May 1999, that David Rank, a US diplomat, got out of bed in Beijing.

He turned on the television and switched to CNN. The American news network was carrying live pictures of the smouldering Chinese embassy in pitch-dark Belgrade.

By that afternoon, thousands of irate Chinese protesters would be gathered outside. But Rank, at that stage, was fairly calm. He rang his boss, the head of the political section: “I said, you know, Jim, this is the damndest thing.”

The diplomat rushed from his residence to the embassy down the road, where US officials were trying to figure out what had happened. Something had clearly gone wrong but this must have been, had to have been, a tragic mistake.

“It was so patently obvious that it was a sort of fog of war accident… At that point I didn’t think that down the road this was going to be a major problem. Obviously, it was a major problem, but not the sort of convulsive incident that it turned out to be,” said Rank.

But in the next hours, the shape of how the Chinese government and people would respond started to become clear.

Rank began receiving calls from liberal Chinese friends who were outraged at the bombing. American journalists got similar calls from Chinese contacts with pro-US views, expressing shock and a sense of betrayal.

Chinese state media was already laying out a clear narrative - the US had breached international law by bombing a Chinese diplomatic outpost. “The language that I heard from lots and lots of Chinese, it was identical. It was the same almost word-for-word lines of real anger,” said Rank.

By that afternoon thousands of students were streaming onto the streets of Beijing. They gathered outside the embassy and things quickly turned violent.

“They were pulling up the paving stones. Beijing sidewalks aren’t paved, they have big tiles and they were pulling those up and smashing them and throwing them over the walls.”

Many of those bits of concrete were crashing through the windows of a building where more than a dozen embassy staff, including US Ambassador James Sasser, had hunkered down. Embassy cars were being defaced and attacked.

The message was clear: the bombing was intentional and, as one slogan went, “the blood of Chinese must be repaid”. The protests would continue the next day, with even more people - some reports said 100,000 - storming the diplomatic district, and pelting stones, paint, eggs and concrete at the British and American embassies.

“We feel like we’re hostages,” Bill Palmer, an embassy spokesman trapped in one of the buildings, said at the time.

Demonstrations of this scale had not been seen in tightly-controlled China. The government had to strike a balance between giving vent to public anger and remaining in control.

In a rare TV address Vice-President Hu Jintao endorsed the protests but also warned they had to remain “in accordance with the law”.

The uproar was not isolated to Beijing. Crowds also took to the streets of Shanghai and other cities that weekend. In central Chengdu, the US consul’s residence was set alight.

​

Weiping Qin, a then 18-year-old student leader at the maritime college in southern Guangzhou city, said demonstrators were not informed that Nato had already apologised for what it said was an accident. “The government was hiding this important message. They didn’t tell us - so young people, everybody, felt angry. We just wanted to go in the streets and protest against the United States.”

He said that initially students at his college were told they had to stay in their dormitories. But 24 hours after the bombing, the university leadership told him that they needed 30,000 students in the streets around the US consulate - 500 of whom would come from the maritime college.

The fired-up students drew lots to choose who could attend. They were loaded onto buses and given statements to read that echoed the stilted official language being broadcast by state media. “They gave us long sentences. But in the street, to speak out in long sentences is very hard.” He decided to yell slogans about the evils of Nato and the US instead.

“We were just young people and we just felt angry. Our emotions came out like a wave,” said Qin, who now lives in the US and criticises the Chinese government in YouTube videos.

David Rank agreed that the anger was genuine. “I think it would really sell the Chinese people short to say this was manufactured by the system,” he said. “There was real outrage.”

Since the early 1990s, China had embarked on a concerted campaign to instil nationalism and “patriotic education” in its people. The narrative pushed in school textbooks, university classrooms and the media was that China - home to a great and benevolent civilisation - had been subjugated and humiliated at the hands of Western powers. The Belgrade embassy bombing fit the story.

“The anger that ordinary Chinese felt I think can only be understood in that historical context, being socialised to resent the West,” said Peter Gries, a professor of Chinese politics at Manchester University and an expert on Chinese nationalism.

For Liu Mingfu - a retired People’s Liberation Army colonel known for his hardline views of the US - the embassy bombing was part of a series of events that proved the US was engaged in a “new Cold War against China”.

“It was totally intentional. It was a purposeful, planned bombing, rather than an accident,” he said.

China would receive $28m in compensation from the US for the bombing, but had to give back close to $3m for the damage to US diplomatic property in Beijing and elsewhere. The US paid another $4.5m to the families of the dead and injured.

***

On the day of the bombing, Dusan Janjic, an academic and advocate for ethnic reconciliation in Yugoslavia, was having lunch at an upscale restaurant in central Belgrade with a man he considered a good friend.

Ren Baokai was the military attaché at the Chinese embassy and Janjic said he was surprisingly open with him about the fact that China was spying on Nato and US operations and tracking warplanes from its Belgrade outpost. The attaché invited him to dinner at the embassy that night because he knew he liked Chinese food.

“And I started making jokes. ‘Come on, you’re going to be bombed! I’m not coming!’,” Janjic recalled. He was being facetious: he did not actually think the embassy would be hit.

But Janjic couldn’t make it to dinner and that evening, when the missiles flew into the building, Ren was thrown to the ceiling by the blast and then fell through a crater left by a bomb. He was found in the basement in a coma only the next morning.

Five months after the strikes, in October 1999, two newspapers - Britain’s Observer and Denmark’s Politiken - suggested that activities overseen by the military attaché might have prompted an intentional US bombing.

Citing Nato sources, they reported that the embassy was being used as a rebroadcast station for Yugoslav army communications and was as a result removed from a prohibited target list. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright decried the story as “balderdash”, while British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said there was “not a single shred of evidence” to support it.

But two decades later, Jens Holsoe, Politiken’s correspondent in the Balkans from 1995 to 2004, and John Sweeney, formerly of the Observer and now with the BBC, said they stood by their reporting that the bombing was intentional.

Holsoe said what made him investigate in the first place was CIA Chief George Tenet publicly saying that satellite images gave no indication the target was an embassy - “no flags, no seals, no clear markings” - when in fact all three were present.

One of his sources - a very senior Danish military figure - almost went on the record to confirm publicly that the bombing was intentional, he said. “Then he suddenly backed out and said if he uttered another word to me about this story that not only did he risk being fired but also prosecuted.”

Holsoe said it was clear at the time that there was military co-operation between Serb forces and the Chinese - and that he personally saw military vehicles entering and exiting the Chinese embassy. American officials told the New York Times that after the bombing they learned the embassy was China’s most significant intelligence collection platform in Europe.

Ren Baokai survived and was later given the rank of general. He declined an interview with the BBC, saying he was now retired.

The Chinese ambassador who narrowly survived the strike, Pan Zhanlin, denied in a book that the embassy had been used for re-broadcasting and that China, in exchange, had been given parts of the US F-117 stealth fighter jet that Serbian forces had shot down in the early stages of the Nato campaign.

It’s widely assumed that China did get hold of pieces of the plane to study its technology. It’s also been speculated that China was using the Nato air campaign to test technology to track stealth bombers that are normally undetectable.

But even if all these stories are true - the question remains: would the US really take the risk of bombing a Chinese embassy on purpose?

Even among ex-Yugoslav insiders there is no consensus. One former military intelligence officer told the BBC he believed the bombing was intentional and that the CIA’s explanation was ludicrous; while another, a retired colonel, said he believed America’s story.

“When something bad happens everybody thinks there has to be a secret reason - not a cock-up but a conspiracy,” said the former Nato spokesman Jamie Shea. “I think it’s complete nonsense - it was a bad map-reading error and a bad mistake.”

On a sunny day in late April, more than a dozen fresh bouquets were stacked up neatly against the memorial stone, but Shen Hong still felt compelled to re-arrange them. He comes to the site of the embassy bombing regularly, to remember his friends that died. But these days, it’s rare that he is alone.

***

Busloads of Chinese tourists arrive every day to gaze at the memorial and the statue of the Chinese sage and philosopher Confucius that now stands nearby.

A young Chinese couple, Zhang and He, were in Belgrade for their honeymoon and decided to visit the memorial. They are around the same age that Xu Xinghu and Zhu Ying were when they were killed in 1999. “Three of our countrymen died here. We knew about this since we were kids and we came to see it,” said He.

Yang, a guide who was leading some 30 middle-aged Chinese tourists on a two-week bus tour through the Balkans, said the embassy site was a mandatory stop. “Our embassy was destroyed by Americans. Every Chinese knows this.”

In 1999, China was not the economic, technological and military giant it is now. It was focused on getting wealthy and had a much less visible foreign policy. But 20 years later the country knows it sits at the top table with America and its ambitions around the world reflect that.

The Belgrade embassy site is being turned into a Chinese cultural centre that will be one of the biggest in Europe. The symbolism is hard to miss: a site of national humiliation and tragedy at the hands of the West re-born as a shiny edifice to China’s glorious history.

It’s a sign that Beijing has no plans to forget a bombing that allows it to paint the US as an imperialist superpower looking to hurt China. Diplomats who have served in Beijing say the incident is still brought up regularly in conversations.

But even those who called for immediate retaliation in 1999 now realise it was fortunate that China’s reaction did not spiral out of control: no Americans were killed during the protests and the compensation agreement allowed Beijing to draw a line - if a thin one - under the incident.

“We were the fastest developing country, every year our economy grew by double-digits. And if we would have stopped that because of war back then, we would have lost a lot,” said Shen, as another group of tourists arrived at the memorial.

“By nature, I’m a radical. I am always more for war than for a conversation. But when I look back, they did a good thing. Because now we can sit equally with the Americans.”

(End)