Not Very Material but Hardly Immaterial: China’s Bombed Embassy and Sino-American Relations

Abstract

In 1999 Sino-American relations experienced intense strain as a result of NATO's Kosovo intervention, and in particular by the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by an American B-2 bomber. Why did the bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade in the spring of 1999 touch such a raw nerve among the Chinese people and leadership? With the coming of the tenth anniversary of these events, what still needs to be explained is how Chinese and Americans could draw such divergent conclusions about that which they've never disagreed on—the incontestable fact of the embassy's demolition—and how the fact that what Americans called “a mistake” could almost completely derail Sino-American relations, which President Clinton in his very successful visit to China a year before had called a “strategic partnership.” Based on a series of semistructured interviews the author did in Beijing and Washington with 28 Chinese and 30 American experts, this research draws a number of important conclusions in this regard. First, intensifying and even defining the conflict were a number of important perceptual gaps. Second, given the dispute over the intentionality of the embassy bombing, the conflict boiled down not to clashing interests, per se, but rather to issues of trust and beliefs about motives and intentions. Third, poor handling of the embassy bombing by both governments deepened the conflict and the alienation both sides felt. Fourth, underlying the lack of trust and the perceptual gaps between the two sides was “Fundamental Attribution Error.”