COLUMN-For Xi’s China, Europe visit part of a wider confrontation

The South China Morning Post suggested Beijing wanted to "avoid alienating" the United States too much. Xi's trip, which began with a visit to France before stops in Serbia and Hungary, represents his most significant diplomatic travel since a November meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in California.

In the Serbian village of Budjanovci outside Belgrade, people have talked for years about the Chinese teams that descended on the area following the shooting down of a U.S. F-117 stealth fighter in March 1999, offering to buy pieces of wreckage taken by villagers as souvenirs. Exactly how much of the wreckage they were able to salvage remains unclear – large parts remain in an aviation museum in Belgrade. And Zoltan Dani, commander of the missile battery that brought down the jet, and now a baker after a brief career in politics, says he still has pieces in his garage.

In the last three years, however, what may well be government-backed speculation on Chinese social media has begun to link the stealth salvage operation to the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade less than two months later, on May 7, 1999. Chinese authorities have never accepted U.S. arguments that the bombing was an accident and in recent years Chinese media has publicised the anniversary and said it should never be forgotten.

This week, Chinese President Xi Jinping used the 25th anniversary of that attack – which killed three Chinese nationals reportedly working as journalists within the building – as one of the linchpins of his major state visits to Europe. In an article for a Serbian newspaper, Xi talked of the relationship between Beijing and Belgrade being strengthened by being forged in "blood and fire" by the attack.

It was a reminder that Beijing sees itself in an era-defining and not always bloodless confrontation with Washington, also signalling Beijing's hopes that as few European states as possible will take the U.S. side. In Serbia in particular, both Chinese and Serbian officials talked of pushing back against U.S. hegemony. Despite arranging his trip for the anniversary, however, the Chinese leader avoided a visit to the site this week. The South China Morning Post suggested Beijing wanted to "avoid alienating" the United States too much.

Xi's trip, which began with a visit to France before stops in Serbia and Hungary, represents his most significant diplomatic travel since a November meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in California. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban is already China's closest friend within the European Union, while Beijing is even closer to Serbian leader Aleksander Vucic. Both also have their own separate relationships with the Kremlin.

Serbia has been wooed by Moscow, Beijing and the European Union, as well as by France which is selling it new fighter jets – but it also has a long-term face-off with the West over Kosovo and is also looking to push back Western influence in other Balkan states. While those relations are continuously evolving, Beijing's efforts to create divisions within the West are far from new, both independently and in conjunction with the Russians.

In 1958, as the United States threatened to use atomic weapons to deter Mao Zedong from invading Taiwan's outlying islands while also working to deter a Soviet move against West Berlin, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan he believed Moscow and Beijing were conspiring to overstretch Western forces and looking to divide the United States from Europe. Over the next two decades, it was the United States that successfully helped detach Beijing from Moscow – although both Russia and China also did plenty to do that themselves. More recently, Putin and Xi have again found common ground opposing the West – if anything, Russian domestic media has hyped the anniversary of the bombing more aggressively than media in China.

Western attempts to detach China from Russia are again under way in earnest – but Germany and France are also simultaneously working heavily to keep relations open with Beijing. COMPLEX DYNAMICS

That produces a complex overlapping range of dynamics. Visiting Beijing in September 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz coordinated with the Biden administration to make Chinese condemnation of potential nuclear weapons use in Ukraine a precondition of the meeting, forcing the Kremlin to at least temporarily roll back its apocalyptic atomic warnings. But the German leader's second visit to Beijing last month was criticised within Europe and the United States for being too conciliatory, in part because Scholz was seen as working to redress Chinese irritation over Germany's China strategy released late last year.

That strategy echoed wider European and Western concerns over Chinese dumping of cheap exports, including electric cars, as well as industrial espionage and hacking of sensitive commercial and other information. As Xi visited France this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Europe needed to do more to confront China on a number of issues, warning that otherwise the European Union would be willing to make "full use" of trade sanctions at its disposal to ensure competition remained fair.

Macron used softer language in calling for a more balanced trade relationship, also using Xi's visit to push his vision of a strategically independent Europe dependent on neither Washington nor Beijing. But he also pushed China to cut back on its non-lethal support for Moscow on Ukraine, arguing that the survival of the government in Kyiv was vital to the rest of Europe.

The mere fact these discussions were taking place largely with little reference to the United States will, for Beijing, likely feel like a victory. Recent direct U.S.-China discussions have had the feel of some of the angriest Cold War confrontations. As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken left Beijing after his most recent visit, not a single Chinese official was at the airport to say goodbye. RECENT HISTORY

The last bilateral meeting between Xi and Biden in California was cordial but underscored the seriousness of divisions, with Xi refusing to back down from Beijing's commitment to "reunification" with Taiwan, including by force if needed. U.S. officials have repeatedly briefed that Xi has ordered his military to be ready to overrun Taiwan by 2027, and are working to deter that.

For Beijing, the value of highlighting the U.S. Embassy bombing in Belgrade 25 years ago is multifaceted, but Xi's primary audience is most likely domestic. Since 2021, Chinese bloggers have suggested the U.S. attack was conducted specifically to destroy parts of the stealth aircraft being held in its basement. Such suggestions have pointedly not been taken down by Chinese censors.

Whatever the truth, such tales support Beijing's growing narrative of ongoing confrontation, one in which China will sometimes be forced to take significant risks against the United States. The events of 1999 took place only three years after Beijing's humiliation in the so-called "Third Taiwan Strait Crisis", in which U.S. President Bill Clinton sent two U.S. carrier battle groups to waters near the island to block Chinese efforts to intimidate voters in Taiwan's first free presidential vote.

For some in China, the 1999 attack – conducted by a B2 stealth bomber able to evade radar much better than the older F-117 downed weeks earlier – was seen as another U.S. show of force aimed at reminding Beijing of its capabilities. U.S. officials dismiss such suggestions. Xi's presence and rhetoric of never forgetting the shared suffering of Serbs and Chinese during the Kosovo war also plays well in Serbia - and in Russia, which felt itself humiliated by U.S.-led actions in the Balkans.

Within the wider world, it is another reminder of a still-often unpopular era of U.S.-led international intervention, much of it without U.N. approval. Finally, it plays to European, and particularly French, concerns over the original strike itself.

Shortly after the Kosovo war ended, French officials complained loudly that the raid was planned unilaterally by the United States rather than being run through a NATO targeting process that might have allowed France and other nations to raise objections. That in turn fed long-running concerns in Paris about U.S. dominance of NATO and wider Western strategy, as well as equally long-running U.S. worries over intelligence leaks from France and other allies.

For many in the United States, that single target in Belgrade may now feel like ancient history, a one-off mistake with little wider meaning. For China, it is another transgression in more than a century of "humiliation" by the West, one that the current government in Beijing, and Xi in particular, are still signalling that they hope to dramatically reverse. * Peter Apps is a Reuters columnist writing on defence and security issues. He joined Reuters in 2003, reporting from southern Africa and Sri Lanka and on global defence issues. He is also the founder of a think-tank, the Project for Study of the 21st Century, and, since 2016, has been a Labour Party activist and British Army reservist. (Editing by Nick Macfie)

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