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ASIA
MAY 24, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 20
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In particular, the decision to not offer China WTO admission has hurt Zhu in a way that may haunt the White House. For the Chinese, WTO accession would mean easier trade with the rest of the world--a boost for their export-dependent economy. But Zhu took a risk by offering his concessions, which included more openness to U.S. agriculture products and telecom companies. He knew there was a good chance that Beijing hard-liners would argue they were too generous. When Clinton rejected his bid, hard-liners indeed hammered him with charges that he had given too much and got too little.
What really shocked policymakers in Washington last week--and expatriates in China--was just how deeply that anti-U.S. resentment had spread among ordinary people. The bombing became a trigger for a scary outburst. In Beijing foreigners were challenged to give their nationality (suddenly there were Irish and New Zealanders everywhere); in Guangzhou students rallied around the city's anti-imperialism monument eating "Clinton cakes"--bread buns decorated with swastika icing.
The government may have used the media to whip up the anger on the streets--outsiders saw it as a way of deflecting attention from next month's 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre--but it did not create that anger. Even academics familiar with the West assumed that in the Belgrade bombing the U.S. had made a deliberate decision to violate Chinese sovereignty. "The U.S. needs an enemy in the world to solve problems in their own country," says Pan Wenguo, former head of international Chinese studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. Few see the bombing as a mistake that can be forgiven after a simple apology. "We will have to wait for the new [U.S.] President before the situation will improve," says Zhang Yebai, an expert on Sino-U.S. relations at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Clinton's passage from honored guest last June to universal villain today has been abrupt. For a man given to feeling the pain of others, his initial damage control was not good. Touring tornado wreckage in Oklahoma the day after the bombing of the Chinese embassy, the President paused to offer his "regrets and profound condolences" but neglected to apologize. This was an insensitive lapse for the Chinese, who have rankled for decades because of Japanese politicians stretching syntax to avoid apologizing for their country's wartime aggression. With their prickly sense of national pride, the Chinese are quick to react to any perceived slight.
But the anger unleashed by the bombing had deeper roots, coming from a sense of resentment and impotence in China at the predominance of U.S. power in world affairs. On his way to the historic meeting with Mao in 1972, Nixon jotted down in his diary, "What they want: 1. Build up their world credentials. 2. Taiwan. 3. Get U.S. out of Asia." A quarter-century later, China is still struggling with these goals, and the U.S. is the omnipresent bogeyman, criticizing China's political regime, providing military support to Taiwan and maintaining 80,000 troops in Japan and South Korea. Last week's demonstrators accepted as a given that the U.S. is dedicated to keeping China down. "It is because China is not powerful enough," said a 21-year-old student from Peking University who gave her name as Wan. "We must stand together to make China stronger."
Friend or foe? Unless both sides do some rapid repair work, says a White House official, "there is a risk it will turn from a tragedy to a cancer on the relationship." As the protests subsided in Beijing, the government-run media kept up their angry rhetoric against the U.S., and television stations ran Korean War movies with heroic Chinese soldiers killing Americans, in place of the usual NBA broadcasts.
But China still needs the U.S. for its own economic and technological development, and will not want to keep relations in deep freeze for too long. Even as it suspended cooperation with Washington last week on human rights and arms control, two issues Beijing is uncomfortable with anyway, the government said it would continue negotiations on entry into the WTO.
By Wednesday, Wang Li, along with all the other demonstrators, had stopped picketing the embassy--he vowed to continue his protest by boycotting McDonald's--and Ambassador Sasser for the first time in four days was able to leave the battered building. But workmen were only beginning to clean up the broken glass, rocks and other debris. The embassy remained closed for business until further notice, and although Jiang finally accepted a call from Clinton on Friday, nobody could predict how long it would take the U.S. and China to climb out of the hole they have dug for themselves.
With reporting by Jay Branegan and Douglas Waller/Washington, Wendy Kan/Hong Kong, Isabella Ng/Guangzhou and Mia Turner/Beijing
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