Two Attitudes about China - 14 May 1999

A photograph in the paper of a dead Roman senator and a hilarious anecdote about him remind me that America has a life - many lives - of its own that are not just reactions to the drifting thousands of Kosovo refugees, the bombings of Belgrade, the shoot-out in a public school up in the Rockies.

Though I must say that if Americans weren't living these lives you'd think from the record of 75 television channels that that's all they had to think about, reflect on and react to.

But before we come to the senator I must say in the wake of that appalling blunder - the bombing of the Chinese embassy - that it revealed two attitudes about China, one about the people and one about their government, that are new and are frightening. First let me put together in the way that a film editor puts together two or three scenes which apart have little meaning but spliced together produce a story.

I'm splicing together then the turbulent scenes we've been seeing of popular and student demonstrations in Beijing, in Hong Kong, in Shanghai every night. Edit these pictures and sounds up against the supreme commander of Nato - General Wesley Clark - confessing out loud what, in any previous war, would have been blanketed under immediate censorship that the maps or maps from which the Nato airforce experts plotted their mission for tonight were at least three years out of date and therefore did not show that during that time the Chinese embassy had moved across town.

That's such a shameful admission that if it were not true there'd be no point whatever in manufacturing it.

Now cut to those boiling impassioned students again. The thing that struck me was not so much the intensity of their outrage but their sincerity which makes you ask at once, how can anyone believe that the high command of Nato - of 19 nations, all of whom have different relations with China - would deliberately plan to bomb the Chinese Embassy? What can explain the pitiful sincerity of these students towards the loathsome character they scrawl or print on banners: 'Clinton the new Hitler'.

I've listened to one or two China hands this week as well as several foreign correspondents based in Beijing and what they have not told us that I've seen or heard is the simplest thing: that Chinese television has not shown the scenes that overwhelmed our screens for weeks - the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people driven out of their homes, their villages burned, nasty evidence of mass graves and so on.

The Chinese have seen such pictures only after Nato started bombing and of course the commentary said they were fleeing from this terrible strange war that the United States had started.

It then comes out, from the questioning of students, that they have quite clear downright accounts of the war. It was a war started by America for no reason at all against Serbia and its brave leader Milosevic because he's an ally of Russia - which most of the questioned students didn't know and certainly didn't believe was no longer a Communist state.

No point whatever in trying to re-characterise Milosevic as a man who for 10 years has been trying to purge neighbouring Balkan countries of non-Serbians.

The third scene we splice in is, was, to me a total surprise. Last Sunday a fairly prolonged interview with the Chinese ambassador to the United States.

First, I think I'd better say something that many newly-appointed ambassadors don't find out until it's too late. An ambassador is a channel or carrier pigeon of policy not a maker of it. And it was plain from the start that the ambassador was speaking for Beijing and not about to consider the possibility that the embassy bombing was a ghastly mistake.

It was a deliberate act against China. It was a follow up to the charges, which have appalled the Congress and embarrassed the CIA, that Chinese government officials or agents employed by them have for years been transmitting nuclear secrets to Beijing.

That, the ambassador implied, was part of the American - i.e. Clinton - policy to freeze China out of world trade. Any suggestion that the embassy's bombing was a ghastly blunder was ridiculed as a cover-up. A cover-up? As, who was it said, go figure.

He would not say more about the motive until the Chinese themselves had made their investigation and all we can be sure of now is the last thing they will find will be an accident.

Add to this the following bits of information - that the Chinese government-run television announced the bombing was deliberate. They did not report Mr Clinton's apology. The Vice-President of China went on live television, not only to endorse but to praise, the student demonstrations. And the banners, slogans, bull-horns and buses used by the demonstrators were openly provided by the Communist Youth League.

And now we hear that the Chinese have every intention of siding with Russia in what is universally and fatuously known as the peace-making process - which, according to the draft the Russians would approve, sounds to our side like caving in to Milosevic.

Also a Chinese delegate to the United Nations has fallen short, just, of a positive promise to use their veto in the Security Council if the American proposals are unsatisfactory.

Well even the Russians in the early days of the United Nations would sit and listen and scowl through debates. Even Mr Gromyko did not advertise, before a resolution was put to the Security Council, that he would use his veto.

We knew he would. He used it in his time, I think, 60 times which demonstrated to us in the 1940s what none of us wanted to hear, that the existence of the veto, the fact that any of the big five - the US, the USSR, Great Britain, France and China (which was then non-Communist China) - the fact that they could veto any proposal for the United Nations to go to war to stop an aggression was hopeless.

The United Nations was founded in the sensible guess that no action, which meant force, could ever be taken by the UN unless the five big powers were in agreement. This meant that we believed then, for about six months, that the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviets would live in perpetual harmony.

Of course that turned out to be a utopian delusion. And so for 95 per cent of the time every United Nations solution was a surrender to the aggressive nation masquerading as a healthy compromise.

What does all this mean? The declared belief that the bombing was planned, that the Chinese government approves of, if not excited, the street demonstrations, that Mr Clinton's apology was never mentioned, that if a settlement, so-called, goes to the UN the Chinese will be ready to veto any American solution.

All this was put up the other day to Dr Henry Kissinger. He knows China and the Chinese rulers as well as anybody in this country or in Europe. And the upshot of his comments was that this week has marked the gravest turn in American-Chinese relations.

That the Chinese appear to have decided on an organised anti-American policy to initiate, you might say, a Pacific Cold War, and if this is so Dr Kissinger believes somebody in this administration must point out soon that a policy of tolerance, of compromise, of getting along, in the long run must be attempted between these two vast and potentially explosive powers.

That if this is a new, deliberate policy, and if the Chinese persist in it, then he thought in the next year or two the United States would have to face the prospect of - he paused - a confrontation.

Dr Kissinger is a diplomat, one of the most remarkable of our time, and an historian. When he uses a word like "confrontation" we think of the unthinkable.

I'd meant this talk to be a welcome relief, I might almost say entertainment, after the chronicle of woes from Kosovo to Littleton, Colorado that it's been necessary to look at in the past few weeks. But the reaction of the Chinese government to the bombing accident is so overdone, so cool and so ordered that it does suggest an actual decision of high policy and as such it rings an alarm bell.

Years ago I remember the most distinguished of American political commentators, a great journalist with access to all the leaders of his day. His name was Walter Lippmann. At the very end of his life he appeared on television for the first time, sitting with a small circle of university students and answering questions.

The producer or director of this programme must have had a true dramatic sense for one question that came up turned out to be the last.

"Mr Lippmann," said one student, "what is the worst thing you could imagine happening in our time?"

Lippmann - an old man with melancholy, handsome features thought for what seemed an age. It was probably 10 seconds. He looked up, he turned to the young man, he said quietly and wearily: "China on the loose."

We now have to decide whether China on the rampage is more alarming than China on the loose.

I'm sorry about the Roman senator - he was not a Roman he was a senator from Nebraska and Roman was his first or given name. Or, as I keep begging visiting Englishmen not to ask of a newly-met American: "Your Christian name?"

Next week let us hope our world is still stable enough to hear about Senator Roman Hruska and other great comedians of his ilk.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.