回望20年前的贝尔格莱德“五八事件”_风闻

BBC网站5月7日刊登调查新闻《美国轰炸中国使馆的那天晚上》

文：Kevin Ponniah & Lazara Marinkovic

译：Kris

那天晚上午夜时分，塞尔维亚工程师弗拉达急匆匆地赶往他在贝尔格莱德的公寓。早些时候他带着20岁的儿子一起出门，但在南斯拉夫首都不论走到哪里都是满天倾泻而下的炸弹。电网瘫痪，他想回家。

自1999年3月下旬以来，全世界最强大的军事联盟北约不断发动空袭，试图阻止南联盟总统斯洛博丹·米洛舍维奇对科索沃省阿尔巴尼亚族人的暴行。现在时间来到了5月7日，美国主导的空袭行动愈演愈烈。

近几周来，每当空袭警报开始嘶鸣时，弗拉达全家便与其它人一起，瑟缩在公寓大楼的地下室里，祈祷不会有打偏的导弹击中他们的家。

有人认为他们是幸运的，因为他们就住在中国大使馆旁边，而后者是具有重要地位的外交使团。躲在中国使馆旁边必定能保得周全。

就在弗拉达和儿子摸黑接近公寓楼玻璃门的时候，美国B-2隐形战机正掠过贝尔格莱德上空。它们已经根据坐标精确锁定了打击目标，而这个目标是美国中央情报局选中并确认过的。说时迟那时快，一枚导弹划空而过，在弗拉达耳中留下尖锐的呼啸声。炸碎的门和玻璃向外飞溅，根本来不及躲开。

“第一枚炸弹的冲击力把我们从地面抛起来，然后跌下去……接着一个又一个（的炸弹落下来）——砰、砰、砰。整个建筑群所有的百叶窗都被冲击波撕开，所有的窗户都被震碎了。”

他们害怕但没有受伤。五枚炸弹都全部击中了100米外的中国驻南联盟大使馆。

美国和北约在未经联合国授权的情况下进行狂轰滥炸，导致大量平民伤亡，已经引发中国和俄罗斯的强烈反对以及国际社会的密切监督。现在，他们又在巴尔干半岛心脏地带袭击了象征中国主权的使馆。

从窗户撤离现场的使馆工作人员

在贝尔格莱德的另一端，消息灵通的中国商人沈洪（音）被告知大使馆遭到袭击。他一开始拒绝相信这个消息。就在几天前，他父亲从上海打电话来时，还开玩笑地说儿子你应该把新买的奔驰车停在使馆大楼前以确保安全。

“我打电话给警队里的熟人，他说，‘是的，沈，它真的被击中了’。他还说赶紧过来，那时我才确信这事真的发生在现实中。”

沈洪来到使馆时，满眼狼藉。使馆着火后不断燃烧；满身是血和尘土的工作人员正爬出窗户逃生。与米洛舍维奇（他两周前被国际法庭指控犯有反人类罪）关系紧密的南联盟政客也抵达现场，谴责爆炸事件是北约野蛮行径的最新例证。

沈洪回忆道：“我们进不去。烟太浓，又没有电，什么都看不见。那情形太可怕了！”

沈洪（音）在惨案中失去了两位密友：许杏虎和朱颖

沈洪突然发现了一位他认识的使馆文化专员，他把窗帘布系在一起，从二楼窗户爬了出来。“我们没看到他身上的伤，他自己也没注意到。直到跟他握手后才发现我手上全是血。我跟他说‘你负伤了，你负伤了！’他看到我手上的血时昏了过去。“

第二天，沈洪得知自己的两位密友——新婚燕尔的记者许杏虎（31岁）和朱颖（27岁）——居住的宿舍被炸弹击中，当场牺牲。他们的尸体在一堵倒塌的墙下被发现。

两人都是《光明日报》的编辑。许杏虎是毕业自北京外国语大学，讲一口流利的塞尔维亚语，他写过一系列记录贝尔格莱德生活的特别报道，取名为《亲历炮火》。

朱颖在该报的广告部担任美术编辑。她母亲在得知女儿死讯时悲痛得昏厥过去，被送往医院；朱父独自前往贝尔格莱德看遗体。

第三名记者、新华社的邵云环（48岁）也在空袭中牺牲了。她的丈夫曹荣飞眼睛受重伤有失明危险。另一名使馆军事专员在被运送回国时一直处于昏迷状态。此番轰炸总共造成三人死亡，至少20人受伤。

在沈洪看来，这就是战争行为。第二天，他高举标语“北约：纳粹美国的恐怖组织”，走上贝尔格莱德街头进行抗议。

这句标语颇能反映后来事态的发展。

牺牲的三名记者（左起）：邵云环、许杏虎、朱颖

***

轰炸发生后的数小时内，出现了两种彼此矛盾的说法。这两种叙事在接下来几个月内逐渐固化，并构成了围绕着该事件争议的基础——而它直到今天仍然是中美关系当中挥之不去的阴霾。

北约的轰炸引发了种种猜测，人们将其中许多悬疑之处拼凑在一起，暗示事件背后有个巨大的阴谋。阴谋论持续笼罩着该事件，几个月之后，欧洲两家备受尊敬的报社刊文称空袭是预先策划好的。

但许多北约前官员表示，尽管几乎所有中国人都坚信不是误炸，但20年来没有确凿证据可以支持这种观点。而且美国也极力否认轰炸是蓄意行为。

炸弹落地后数小时内，美国和北约便连忙宣布该事件属于意外。而同时中国驻联合国代表则开始对“战争罪”和“野蛮行径”表示谴责。

当天晚上，这场战争的代言人——北约发言人杰米·谢伊——在布鲁塞尔的床上被唤醒，并被告知次日一早须要面对全世界新闻媒体。当时他掌握的信息并不多，但他对该事件做出了最早的解释，并表示歉意。他在记者会的讲台上说，轰炸机“打击了错误的建筑物。”

20年后，谢伊表示：“这就像火车或汽车事故——你知道发生了什么，但你不知道原因在哪里。很久之后才能还原真相……但有一件事从一开始就很明确，那就是打击外国大使馆不在北约计划之内。”

朱颖的父亲在贝尔格莱德见到女儿遗体

直到一个多月之后，美国才给出一个完整的解释：美国犯了一系列低级错误，导致五枚由全球定位系统制导的导弹炸弹打击了中国大使馆——其中一枚穿过使馆主楼旁边的大使住所，所幸没有爆炸。

按照美国官员的说法，真正的轰炸目标是南联盟军需供应采购局总部——该政府机构负责南联盟国防设备的进出口事务。灰色的办公楼今天仍然矗立在那里，距中国大使馆遗址有数百米之远。

北约最初希望在数日内结束轰炸行动，逼迫米洛舍维奇放弃，将其部队撤出科索沃地区，并允许维和人员进入。但到中国大使馆被炸时，空袭已经持续了六个多星期。为维持空中打击强度，北约急于寻找数以百计的新目标，这时，通常不参与目标选择的中情局加入其中，并决定对南联盟军需供应采购局进行打击。

可是，作为美国最顶尖的情报机构，中情局竟然声称它使用了一张错误的地图。

美国国防部长威廉·科恩在轰炸案发生两天后说道：“简单来说情况就是，因为轰炸指令是基于过时的地图，我们的一架飞机袭击了错误的目标。”他指的是美国政府使用的一张地图，上面把中国大使馆和南联盟军需供应采购局的位置都标错了。

关于南联盟军需供应采购局，美国情报人员掌握的全部信息就是一个地址：艺术大街2号，估测其坐标时也仅仅采用了最基础的军事测量技术。中情局局长乔治·特尼特后来表示，当时采用的测量方式十分不精确，根本不应用来挑选轰炸目标。

特尼特还说，无独有偶，情报和军事数据库的交叉检查也没有发现错误，因为它们没有更新中国大使馆的地址，尽管事实上许多美国外交官曾经出入过该建筑。

任何人只要去过现场，就会发现那是一个有大门的院子，里面有栋五层高的青瓦坡屋顶建筑，门口铜匾上清楚地写着这是中国大使馆，10米高处还飘扬着鲜艳的五星红旗。

许多人认为中情局的解释不足取信：全世界最先进的军队对联合国常任理事国、北约空袭行动最坚定的反对者进行了轰炸，给出的理由是地图错误。中国丝毫不相信这种说法，认为其“不具说服力”。

中国外交部长李肇星告诉专程赴北京解释该事件的美国特使：“中国政府和人民不能接受误炸的结论。”

可美国为什么要蓄意攻击中国呢？

***

1999年5月8日，星期六，日出后不久，美国驻北京外交官大卫·兰克爬起床，打开电视，转到CNN频道。电视里播放着贝尔格莱德黑夜里中国大使馆闷燃的现场照片。

他知道，到下午时分，门外将聚集数千名愤怒的中国人抗议示威。但此刻的兰克还比较冷静，他打电话给政治部门的上司，说：“你知道，吉姆，这是最糟糕的事。”

兰克连忙从住所赶往美国使馆，美方官员正试图了解昨晚发生的事情。人们知道出了大事，但这件事必须是、只能是一个悲剧性的错误。

兰克说：“显而易见，它是一场战争迷雾式的意外事故……因此那时候我根本没料到后来会发展出这么大的问题。它当然是件大事，但没想到它会是一个引起全面震动的重大事件。”

在接下来的几个小时里，中国政府和中国人民的反应变得越来越明确。

兰克开始接到中国自由派朋友的电话，他们对轰炸事件感到震怒。美国在华记者们也接到了类似的电话，中国的亲美人士纷纷向他们致电表达震惊和背叛感。

这时，中国官方媒体已经开始对事件进行定性阐述：美国轰炸中国外交使馆的行为，已经违反了国际法。兰克说：“太多太多中国人对我说着一模一样的话。几乎一字不差地传达着他们真实的愤怒。”

到那天下午，数千学生走上北京街头，聚集在美国大使馆外。事情很快变得暴力。

“他们捡起铺路的石头——北京的人行道有的地方没铺好，他们把砖块扒起来，从墙头扔向馆内。”

许多石块砸穿了使馆建筑物的玻璃窗，里面藏着包括美国大使尚慕杰（詹姆斯·萨塞）在内的十多名工作人员。使馆汽车遭到了破坏和袭击。

中国人传达的消息很清楚：美国是故意轰炸的。一幅标语上写着“血债血偿”。抗议活动持续到第二天，更多人（有报道称10万人）冲击了北京外交区，向英国和美国大使馆投掷石块、油漆、鸡蛋和混凝土块。

美国驻华使馆发言人比尔·帕尔默当时被困在其中一栋楼里，他说：“感觉我们成了人质。”

中国已经很久没爆发过这种规模的示威。政府必须保持平衡，既让公众表达愤慨感情，又维持公共秩序。

时任国家副主席的胡锦涛罕见地发表电视讲话，表示政府“坚决支持、依法保护一切符合法律规定的抗议活动”，但也告诫抗议者必须“依法有序地进行”活动。

美国驻华大使尚慕杰四天没有出门

爆发抗议活动的不止北京。那个周末，抗议者也走上了上海等城市的街头。美国驻成都领事的住所被人焚烧了。

时年18岁的秦伟平（音）是广州航海学院的学生领袖。他说，示威者不知道北约已经为它所说的意外事故道了歉，因此每个年轻人都感到愤怒，一心想着上街去抗议美国。

他说，一开始他的同学们接到的统治是必须留在宿舍里。但轰炸事件发生的24小时后，学校领导告诉他，美国领事馆周围的街道上一共允许3万名学生参与示威，其中给了航海学院500个名额。

怒火中烧的学生们以抽签的方式决定谁可以参加抗议活动。有公共汽车来接他们，有人给他们一份符合官方口径的声明教他们照着读。秦伟平说：“他们写的句子太长了，在街上很难大声喊出长句子。” 他决定改成呐喊口号，批判邪恶的北约和美国。

“我们年轻人就是感到很愤怒，情绪像海浪一样喷涌而出，”现居美国的秦伟平回忆道。

大卫·兰克认为，这种愤怒的情感是真实的。他说：“如果说这种愤怒是政府制造出来的产物，那是侮辱了中国人。他们真的非常愤慨。” 

自90年代初以来，中国加强了爱国主义教育。教科书和课堂的主流叙事都是，中国作为伟大而仁爱的文明，近代遭受了西方列强蹂躏。驻南联盟大使馆被炸事件符合这样的叙事。

曼彻斯特大学中国政治学教授、中国民族主义专家彼得·格里斯说：“我认为需要结合历史背景来理解普通中国百姓的愤怒，他们对西方存在一种社会化的反感。”

以对美国强硬观点而闻名的解放军大校刘明福认为，轰炸使馆事件是美国一系列“反华冷战”行径的一部分。

“这完全是蓄意轰炸。这是一次有目的性、有计划的轰炸，不是什么意外，”他说。

中国从美国获得了2800万美元赔偿金，其中又还回300万美元用于赔偿美国驻华使领馆财产损失。美国又向遇难者家属和负伤人员赔偿了450万美元。

***

轰炸当天，倡导民族和解的南斯拉夫学者杜桑·詹尼奇在贝尔格莱德市中心一家高档餐厅与好友共进午餐。

这位友人是中国大使馆的武官任宝凯。詹尼奇表示，他坦言中国在监视北约和美国的行动，并追踪战机动向。任宝凯邀请他当晚去使馆吃饭，因为他知道詹尼奇喜欢中国菜。

詹尼奇回忆道：“当时我开玩笑地说。‘得了吧，你们会被轰炸的！我才不去！’”他只是说着玩，根本没想到大使馆真的会受到袭击。

当天晚上詹尼奇没法在使馆吃完饭，当导弹飞进使馆大楼时，任宝凯被冲击波抛向天花板，然后跌进了弹坑，直到第二天早上昏迷的他才在地下室里被发现。

共有五枚炸弹击中使馆区域，一枚未爆炸

轰炸事件发生五个月后，1999年10月，英国的《观察家报》和丹麦的《政治报》刊文称，中国武官所说的监视行动可能是美国蓄意轰炸的动机。

两家报纸援引北约线人的消息称，大使馆被南斯拉夫军队当作通信转播站，因此被北约从禁止攻击的目标名单中删除。美国国务卿马德琳·奥尔布赖特谴责这个报道是“一派胡言”，英国外交大臣罗宾·库克则表示，“完全没有一丝一毫的证据”来支持这种说法。

但二十年后，丹麦《政治报》1995至2004年驻巴尔干地区特派记者扬斯·霍尔索和当年《观察家报》的记者约翰·斯威尼都表示，他们坚持认为轰炸是蓄意进行的。

霍尔索说，他最初展开调查的原因是中情局局长乔治·特尼特的公开声明，后者说卫星图像没有标明该目标是大使馆，称其“没有旗帜，没有标识，没有明显的记号”——但其实三者都存在。

他表示，自己的消息来源是一名丹麦军方高级官员，他几乎准备公开确认轰炸是蓄意而为。“然后他突然反悔了，说如果自己再向我透露一个字，他不仅会被开除而且还会遭到起诉。”

霍尔索声称，当时塞尔维亚武装显然与中国之间有军事合作，他亲眼看到当地军车进出中国大使馆。美国官员告诉《纽约时报》，轰炸后他们了解到该使馆是中国在欧洲收集情报的重要平台。

幸存下来的任宝凯后来被授予少将军衔。他称自己已经退休，拒绝了BBC的采访请求。

同样经历了空袭的中国驻南斯拉夫联邦大使潘占林在著作《战火中的外交官》里否认大使馆参与了通信转播，也否认了中国获得塞尔维亚军队击落的美国F-117隐形战机部件的传言。

有人认为，中国拿到了F-117的部件，对其进行了技术研究。还有人猜测，中国利用北约空袭的机会测试了反隐形技术。

但即便这些传言是真的，仍然有个地方说不通：美国难道真的甘愿冒险蓄意轰炸中国大使馆？

就连前南政府的内部人士也没有形成共识。一名前南军事情报官员告诉BBC，他认为那场轰炸是蓄意而为，中情局的解释十分荒谬；但另一位退休上校则声称，他相信美国给出的解释。

前北约发言人杰米·谢伊表示：“当发生不好的事情时，每个人都认为肯定有某种隐情—— 不是出岔子，而是有预谋。我认为这是胡说八道，那就是误读地图，是一次糟糕的错误。”

***

四月下旬一个阳光明媚的日子里，纪念石上的十几束鲜花排列得很整齐，但沈洪仍觉得必须重新整理一下花束。他会定期来到使馆被炸的现场，纪念他死去的友人。不过现在，来这里的人不止他一个。

每天都有大批中国游客来这里参观纪念馆和矗立在附近的孔子雕像。

一对年轻的中国夫妇在贝尔格莱德度蜜月，他们决定参观纪念馆。他们与许杏虎和朱颖1999年牺牲时的年龄差不多。妻子说：“有三名同胞死在这里。我们从小就知道这件事，所以过来看看。”

一位杨姓导游带着大约30名中年游客进行为期两周的巴尔干半岛大巴游，他说大使馆遗址是中国游客们必选的一站。“美国人毁了我们的大使馆，每个中国人都知道。”

大使馆旧址变成了欧洲最大的中国文化中心之一

1999年的中国，还没有成长为今天这个经济、技术和军事巨人。它把重心放在致富上，外交上不那么引人注目。时隔20年，中国很清楚它已经具备与美国分庭抗礼的资格，其全球雄心已经反映了这一点。

贝尔格莱德大使馆遗址被改造成了欧洲规模最大的中国文化中心。它的象征意义不容忽略：这里曾经上演西方带来的耻辱和悲剧，而今脱胎换骨成为中国辉煌历史的殿堂。

这也显示，中国不准备忘却那场轰炸，因为它中国可以把美国描绘成一个准备伤害中国的帝国主义超级大国。外国驻华外交官员表示，中国不时还会提起这件事。

但即便是那些当年呼吁中国立即采取报复行动的人，现在也意识到中国的反应没有失控是件多么值得庆幸的事。在抗议期间，没有造成美国人员死亡，达成赔偿协议之后，中国或多或少还是让这件事过去了。

随着另一批游客来到纪念馆前，沈洪表示：“我们是发展最快的国家，每年经济以两位数增长。如果当年打起仗来终止了这种发展势头，那将是多么巨大的损失。”

“我的本性是个很激进的人。属于能动手就不动口的那种。但回头来看这件事，这么做是对的。因为现在我们可以和美国人平起平坐了。”

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)