On May 7, 1999, a United States Air Force B-2 Spirit, participating in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, dropped five Joint Direct Attack Munition satellite-guided bombs on the Embassy of China, Belgrade, FR Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalists and injuring twenty-seven others. This incident is known by many in Serbia and in China as the May 8 incident. According to the United States, the intention had been to bomb the headquarters of Yugoslav weapons importer Yugoimport, which existed 440 meters south of the Embassy of China, on the same street. At-the-time President of the United States, Bill Clinton, apologized for the bombing and claimed it was an accident.
The United States of America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director at the time of the bombing, George Tenet, later testified that the embassy bombing was the only one in the campaign organized by the CIA, and that the CIA had "miscalculated" the geopositioning of the Yugoimport's building's coordinates from its address. The Yugoimport building was later also bombed, as the US had originally intended, but the building still remains standing as of 2019. The US claimed its own map and satellite imagery analysis approved the target while failing to identify it as an embassy. Although extensively referenced as a NATO mission and aircraft, all B-2 strikes were targeted and flown under US European Command alone. One CIA officer was fired following an investigation.
The Chinese government declared the bombing a "barbarian act", and rejected the June 17, 1999 final explanation presented by a US delegation, calling it "by no means acceptable to the Chinese Government and people". Anti-US and anti-NATO protests, many tens of thousands strong, swept across China. Crowds outside US and NATO missions in major cities threw rocks and destroyed vehicles, setting alight the US Consul General's residence in Chengdu. No serious injuries occurred. Around the world, Chinese students and diaspora peacefully protested at US embassies.
In October 1999, The Observer and Politiken published a joint investigation concluding that the bombing was deliberate. Believing the embassy was hosting rebroadcasting for the Yugoslav Army, NATO allegedly transferred the embassy from a prohibited target list to a designated target list. The embassy was reportedly collecting measurement and signature intelligence on NATO aircraft and missiles, including the B-2 and F-117A stealth aircraft, and China was allegedly obtaining components from the shootdown of an F-117A in Yugoslavia two months prior. US and UK officials called the newspapers' investigation a fabrication.
In August 1999, the US agreed to pay $4.5 million to the victims and families of the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia. In December 1999, the US compensated China $28 million for damages to the embassy, and China compensated the United States $2.87 million for the damages their protestors caused. In May 2000, the United States–China Relations Act of 2000 paved the way for China's entry into the World Trade Organization. By June 2000, during a visit to China by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, both sides said that relations between them had improved.
Most Chinese people continue to believe the attack was deliberate. A 2002 survey of 28 Chinese security experts found 16 respondents believed the bombing was intentional even though fourteen of them did not suspect Clinton's involvement. The bombing prompted the People's Liberation Army to consolidate domestic air defense, develop cyberwarfare and anti-satellite capabilities, and reconsider its nuclear weapons policy. A Chinese Cultural Center was completed on the former Chinese embassy site in Belgrade, Serbia in 2020.
Sequence of events
In the days before the bombing, an attack folder labelled "Belgrade Warehouse 1" was circulated for command approval. The folder originated within the CIA, and described the target as a warehouse for a Yugoslav government agency suspected of arms proliferation activities. Clinton approved the bombing mission.
It is unclear whether other NATO leaders approved the strike. A report by the French Ministry of Defense after the war said that "part of the military operations were conducted by the United States outside the strict framework of NATO" and that a dual-track command structure existed. NATO had no authority to use any B-2 stealth bomber, which was used to carry out the strike. That the United States was running missions outside of NATO's joint command structure was a source of some contention between the US and other members of NATO, especially France.
According to officials interviewed by The New York Times, the target was checked against a "no-strike" database of locations such as hospitals, churches, and embassies, but this raised no alarm as the embassy was listed at its old address. Officials said a similar list in the UK also had the same error. However, the joint Observer/Politiken investigation reported that a NATO flight controller in Naples said that on this "don't hit" map, the Chinese embassy was listed at its correct location. The investigation also reported that the coordinates of the Chinese embassy were correctly listed in a NATO computer.
At 23:46 CEST on the night of May 7, the strike was carried out by a single B-2 bomber with a crew of two of the United States Air Force's 509th Bomb Wing flying directly out of Whiteman AFB, Missouri. The bomber was armed with Mark 84 2,000-pound bombs, armed with JDAM GPS guidance precision kits. The weapons were accurate to 13 m (14 yd). However, the geographic coordinates provided by the CIA and programmed into the bombs were those of the Chinese embassy 440 m (480 yd) to the north. At around midnight local time, five bombs landed at different points on the embassy complex. The embassy had taken precautionary measures in view of the ongoing bombing campaign, sending staff home and housing others in the basement, but the attack still resulted in three fatalities: Shao Yunhuan (邵云环) who worked for the Xinhua News Agency, Xu Xinghu (许杏虎) and his wife Zhu Ying (朱颖) who worked for Guangming Daily, both Chinese state media, in addition to at least 20 people being injured. American officials said that some or all of the three who were killed were actually intelligence agents, but the Chinese denied the claim.
Chinese reaction
Government reaction
The bombing drew outrage from the Chinese government. An official statement on Chinese television denounced what it called a "barbaric attack and a gross violation of Chinese sovereignty". China's ambassador to the UN described what he called "NATO's barbarian act" as "a gross violation of the United Nations charter, international law and the norms governing international relations" and "a violation of the Geneva convention".
At an emergency CCP Politburo meeting after the bombing, CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin stated, "I am shocked and indignant. This event is not a trivial matter; it is absolutely critical" and that "the Chinese people cannot be bullied!" Jiang also said that had Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai not led China to develop nuclear weapons and satellites, "I fear we would have been attacked earlier on."
On May 12, 1999, the Legislative Council of Hong Kong passed the "Condemnation of NATO" motion in a rare 54–0 bipartisan vote.
On May 12, 1999, in his first public statement since the embassy bombing, Premier of China Zhu Rongji called NATO "hypocrites" and stated that the "idea of safeguarding human rights and democracy, as well as opposing ethnic cleansing which they [NATO] are chanting loudly, is only a fig leaf." He also called on the United States and NATO "to make an open and official apology to the Chinese government and the Chinese people."
President Clinton's apologies and those of the US State Department were not initially broadcast by Chinese state-run media outlets. The demonstrations continued for four days before the Chinese government called a halt, eventually broadcasting President Clinton's apology on television and ordering the police to restrain the demonstrators.
For a week, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Jiang Zemin declined phone calls from President Bill Clinton, eventually accepting a 30-minute apology call on May 14, in which Clinton expressed "regret" over the incident. Jiang had chosen to leave US-China leadership communications channels unused as he waited for the Politburo Standing Committee to reach a consensus. The time it took for the Politburo to gather necessary information and reach a decision about China's responses motivated Party leadership to revisit a proposal to establish a centralized National Security Commission, although this was ultimately not implemented at the time.
In the aftermath of the American bombing, the Chinese government ordered media outlets not to criticize the American president further and the Communist Party directed to the media to report on the United States in a less hostile manner. Generally, these limitations frustrated Chinese journalists.
Public reaction
Large and often violent anti-US and anti-NATO protests erupted across China, targeting the consular offices of the United States and other NATO countries. Large-scale protests at US offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and Shenyang forced their temporary closure. Further protests occurred in Nanjing, Lanzhou, Hong Kong and the Portuguese territory of Macau, seven months prior to its handover to China. Student slogans included "don't take TOEFL, don't take GRE, fight wholeheartedly the American Empire".
Western media accused Chinese media of fueling the protests, pointing to its initial lack of reporting on the US apologies, and rhetoric such as a People's Daily article saying NATO had intentionally "spilled Chinese blood".
The protests continued for several days, during which tens of thousands of rock-throwing protesters kept US Ambassador James Sasser and other staff trapped in the Beijing embassy. The residence of the US Consul in Chengdu was damaged by fire, but there were no reported injuries. The Albanian embassy in Beijing was also attacked.
On May 9, 1999, then Vice President Hu Jintao delivered a national televised speech calling the act both "criminal" and "barbaric" and that it "has greatly infuriated the Chinese people." He said the unauthorized demonstrations in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Shenyang reflected the anger and patriotism of the Chinese people, and which the Chinese government fully supported, but urged against extreme and illegal conduct.
Settlement
By the end of 1999, relations began to gradually improve. In August, the US government made a "voluntary humanitarian payment" of $4.5 million to the families of the three Chinese nationals who were killed and to those who were injured. On December 16, 1999, the two governments reached a settlement under which the United States agreed to pay $28 million in compensation for damage to the Chinese Embassy facility, and China agreed to pay $2.87 million in compensation for damage inflicted to the US Embassy and other diplomatic facilities in China.
Technically, although the $4.5 million paid to the victims and their families came from Department of Defense discretionary funds, the $28 million for the damage to the embassy needed to be appropriated by the United States Congress; 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.
Official investigation and reporting in the aftermath
Late on May 8, US Defense Secretary William Cohen and George Tenet issued a joint press release stating neither the aircrew involved nor the equipment were to blame for the incident. The first attempt to explain the bombing came on May 10. William Cohen told reporters "In simple terms, one of our planes attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map". The statement made no mention of the CIA. It was subsequently revealed that the CIA possessed maps showing the embassy.
While US officials then began, on the record, to deflect questions pending the outcome of further enquiries, they continued to brief journalists off the record. For example, also on May 10, Eric Schmitt published an account with most of the elements that were to feature in Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Tenet's later admissions. Schmitt reported that from the grainy aerial photographs that were used the two buildings looked very similar in terms of size, shape and height, and that the distance between them is about 200 yards (180 m).
Media criticism focused on the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) which made an announcement stating that "recent news reports regarding the accuracy of NIMA maps have been inaccurate or incomplete" and that "a hard-copy map is neither intended, nor used, as the sole source for target identification and approval." CIA Director George Tenet later acknowledged that the map used should never have been used for aerial bombing target selection.
Official State Department account
In June, Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering led a delegation to China to present the US version of events.
According to the official account, CIA analysts knew the address of the Yugoimport office to be Bulevar Umetnosti 2 (2 Boulevard of the Arts). Using this information, they attempted to pinpoint its geographic location by using the known locations and addresses of other buildings on parallel streets as reference points. (The New York Times reported that some referred to what was done as "resection and intersection" although Pickering did not use those terms in the statement.)
Parallel lines were drawn from known addresses and locations on a parallel street. With this information, it was attempted to reconstruct the pattern of street addresses on Bulevar Umetnosti, which was information unknown to the targeteers. The pattern of street addresses on Bulevar Umetnosti was not as expected, and the targeteer erroneously pinpointed the embassy "located on a small side street at some distance on Bulevar Umetnosti" from the intended target.
Multiple checks designed to prevent attacks on sensitive targets each failed as the location of the embassy had not been updated since the embassy moved to New Belgrade three years earlier. As a result, the bombers took to the air with the coordinates of the Chinese embassy programmed into the bombs on board.
Pickering said that they found no evidence that the embassy was being used to assist Serbian forces, and said that it is not conceivable that any rogue group within the US would have done such a thing. He said that, "Science has taught us that a direct explanation, backed up by full knowledge of facts obtained through a careful investigation, is always preferable to speculation and far fetched, convoluted or contrived theories with little or no factual backing."
George Tenet's statement
On July 22, George Tenet made a statement before a public hearing of the House Intelligence Committee. Covering the same ground as Under Sec. Pickering's statement in China, he additionally acknowledged the target package originated within the CIA and that it was the sole CIA-directed strike of the war, stated that he had been personally unaware that the CIA was circulating strike requests and recognized that the CIA possessed maps correctly displaying the embassy. Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre, giving evidence the same day, stated that "NIMA is not at fault".