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| BEIJING (Reuters) - Demonstrators wave Chinese flags outside the U.S. embassy in Beijing Monday as paramilitary People's Armed Police stand guard. U.S. Ambassador to China James Sasser said there were no plans to evacuate the embassy, which has been surrounded by rock-pelting protesters angry over NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. |
In yet another step on the road toward World War Thre , NATO "mistakenly" bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia killing three people and injuring twenty. This action has released a fierce, violent reaction in China and has led to an official halting of diplomatic relations between it and the U.S. and has greatly increased the odds of a direct military conflict in the coming years.
As described in Origins of the Third World War, China, in alliance with Russia, will ultimately face an historic confrontation with the U.S. in a global realignment designed to balance or eliminate the military threat it holds.
Aided by propaganda the Chinese media issues, its citizens are told the attack was deliberate and that the role of the U.S. in the Kosovo Conflict is to increase its imperial power. To them this is a threat.
China has by far the largest manned military and navy in the world and is set to become the new power-house for the twenty-first century. It has nuclear missles and has the secrets to build more thanks to the recent spying episode.
A harsh editorial in the communist party newspaper the People's Daily which accused NATO of being the "archcriminal of humanitarian disasters."
"This is a rare barbaric crime in the history of international relations. The inhuman atrocity of trampling on the internationallaw has incited extreme indignation in the Chinese people and strong condemnation from the international community," said the newspaper in a commentary.
The commentary, entitled "Archcriminal of Humanitarian Disasters" said the "bloody facts have stripped the US-led NATO of its mask as a humanitarian fighter and thoroughly exposed its true nature of ravaging humanity with force...Facts have shown that the archcriminal that produces the humanitarian disasters is no one else but the US-led NATO," it added.
The result by students an citizens in China says it all:
Sunday May 9 3:58 PM ET
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By Benjamin Kang Lim
BEIJING (Reuters) - Screaming ``Kill Americans'' and cursing President Clinton, Chinese students hurled rocks and bottles at the U.S. embassy Sunday after NATO missiles killed four people in China's diplomatic mission in Belgrade.
The British Embassy in Beijing was also pelted with concrete rubble and paint. Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of at least a dozen other Chinese cities.
But after whipping up the popular fury by declaring the NATO strike a deliberate act of war, Chinese authorities pulled back from the brink, issuing a statement intended to limit the violence and soothe jittery foreigners.
Vice President Hu Jintao said in a special television broadcast that while he supported the ``keen patriotism'' of students, demonstrations should not go too far. He insisted that foreigners, including diplomats and businessmen, were safe.
``We must guard against extreme behavior and be vigilant against people taking advantage of the opportunity to disrupt normal social order,'' Hu said.
NATO has said the embassy bombing, occurring almost seven weeks into an air war against Yugoslavia's military, was a tragic mistake and the United States has apologized to China.
Hu also said China's economic reform and market opening policies would not change, sending out the message that calm reason would prevail over raw emotion.
U.S. Ambassador James Sasser was trapped in his embassy, guarded by U.S. Marines, as enraged students tried to storm the compound.
In a telephone interview with the CBS program ``Face the Nation,'' Sasser called the situation ugly, saying rock-throwing demonstrators had broken nearly every window in the embassy's chancery and his personal residence. He said his wife and son had been evacuated to a safer location elsewhere in Beijing.
``No question that we're hostages here,'' Sasser told CBS, the din of the demonstration audible in the background.
Police saturated the embassy district, but made no attempt to stop the violence. Instead, they sought to keep the demonstrators moving in orderly batches.
At one point several students broke into the compound and tried to tear down the American flag from its pole.
``Get out, American pigs!'' the crowds roared.
Hours after Hu's speech, most demonstrators had melted away, leaving a hard core chanting at the embassy's main gates.
Hu's comments highlighted the dilemma facing Chinese leaders, who must be seen to lead public expressions of outrage while trying to preserve social stability at a politically charged moment.
Authorities are bracing for trouble next month on the 10th anniversary of the 1989 army crackdown on pro-democracy student protests.
Several Western reporters were punched and kicked Sunday and the U.S. Embassy advised American nationals to stay off the streets. The International School of Beijing and other expatriate schools in the capital have cancelled classes Monday and Tuesday.
German sources said demonstrators broke into the German consulate in the southern city of Guangzhou Sunday, smashing through one security door but failing to break through a second. No diplomats were present at the time, the sources said.
In the central industrial city of Nanjing, students staged a sit-down protest outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant and plastered posters on windows saying ``Strike The U.S. Economy.'' A foreign student was beaten up, witnesses said.
Anti-NATO protests erupted from Shanghai on the eastern seaboard to Lanzhou in the far west.
Trade unions joined the protests in the southern city of Guangzhou, where several thousand factory workers marched in rain past the U.S. consulate chanting ``Stop American mad dogs from biting.''
The People's Daily newspaper contended that NATO had purposely ``spilled Chinese blood.'' Xinhua news agency quoted a prominent Chinese scientist saying the attack was ``elaborately planned and is a shame of high-technology.''
Xinhua said a Chinese team led by a Foreign Ministry official left for Belgrade Sunday to investigate the bombing.
In Beijing, students wrapped rocks in newspaper which they set on fire before hurling the projectiles into the U.S. embassy compound. Some demonstrators held aloft blazing poles to try to ignite the Stars and Stripes on its flagpole.
A crudely made fire bomb was hurled into the embassy compound but caused little damage.
The embassy expressed ``profound sorrow'' over the bombing and offered ``deepest condolences to the families of the innocent victims of that deplorable accident.''
``We must not let this mistake impede further progress in developing stronger U.S.-China relations that are so fundamentally in the interest of both our countries,'' the embassy said in a statement.
Saturday night, protesters swarmed over the walls of the U.S. diplomatic compound in Chengdu, capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, and broke through the front door of the main consulate building before police chased them out.
The consul-general's house was seriously damaged by fire.
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