By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

A large number of books and articles have been produced about the three incidents we have described in part 1, which along with their discrepancies can be summed up as:

The Realist Model Paradigm, refers to a larger frame of understanding, shared by a wider community of historians, social scientists, and annalists, that organizes smaller-scale theories and inquiries. For a long time, political realism has been the mainstream theory or paradigm that explains, models, and prescribes international conflict. Each of the principal Realist theorists however - offer their own definitions of the term "Realism", but often focus on the aspects they wish to emphasis. Of the threads that make up the Realist school, the most important ideas include:

1) Power. The theory asserts that power is (or ought to be) the primary end of political action. The most important factor in determining what happens in international relations is the distribution of power. The key consideration of the state is the concept of interest defined in terms of power.

2) Rationality. State behavior is rational, or can be best approximated by rational decision-making.

3) Sovereignty. States can never be sure about the intentions of other states; the basic motive driving states is survival or the maintenance of sovereignty.
Thus according to the Realist model, the Sino-American conflict is a clash of national interests, and is caused by struggle for power.

For example, Abram N. Shulsky sees the confluence of two tendencies-China's search for a more active political-military role in the affairs of East Asia and the U.S. policy to maintain strong military forces in the region-will inevitably raise the possibility of potential military conflict between the two countries. (Shulsky, Deterrence Theory and Chinese Behavior, 2000).

Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, in The Coming Conflict with China (1997), argue that Sino-US competition will become the major global rivalry in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. This rivalry will occur due to Chinese desires to dominate Asia and by the US long-standing policy of preventing a single country from dominating that region. The China Threat case however was most credibly made by University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), where he maintained that even if China became democratic, its size and rate of growth made conflict with America inevitable. In fact Mearsheimer's perspective was echoed in the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, released in the fall of 2001, that described China as an emerging "military competitor with a formidable resource base" in East Asia.

Other books published in the United States about "China Threat" include The China Threat (2000), and more recently "Showdown" (2006), reviewed by ourselves here:

See also Case Study 1:

The debate about China as a peer competitor revolves around simple realist notions of how international politics work: Power is what matters; and what matters in power is one's relative capabilities compared with those of others, especially other great powers. Some scholars believe the Post-Cold War US-China relationship represents a pattern of "superpower/great power competition.” (Peter Brookes, "Strategic Realism: The Future of U.S.-Sino Security Relations," Strategic Review, Summer 1999: 53-56.)

When a nation that has become economically and militarily dominant on a global scale is confronted by a rapidly developing regional power with its own imperative needs for identity, dignity, and independence, history shows that the resulting conflict can easily escalate out of control.

Scholars attempt to provide explanations about China's conflict behavior form the Realist perspective, especially through the ideas of rationality and sovereignty. Analysts who adhere to the realist model might therefore argue that all the three crises described in P.1, concern issues of sovereignty, therefore, the basic motive driving China's strong reaction during the three crises was maintenance of sovereignty.

Critics of the Realist model on the other hand assert that the Realist approaches stint or overlook the role of meaning and representation in explaining or accounting for state action. And scholars of both the neorealist and neoliberal traditions have despaired of ever understanding the motives that drive policy makers; they therefore focus their attention on material power. The Realist model thus could not explain why China tried hard most of the time to avoid direct conflicts with the U.S. and other countries on issues that are vital to its national interests, such as trade (WTO), security (arms control) and territory (south China Sea), but took the lead to escalate conflict on occasions such as U.S. permission for a private U.S. visit by Taiwan's President in 1995 and a plane accident. If the maintenance of sovereignty is the basic motivating factor in China's strong reaction during the three arises, how do we explain China's cooperative and restrained behavior when dealing with some other sovereignty issues such as the Yinghe incident, the WTO negotiation and the South China Sea disputes?

The Cognitivist Approaches:  Not all constructivist theories are cognitivist, but all constructivists agree that not only material factors, but also cultural and institutional factors shape the environment for actors in global politics. Cultural environment affects incentives of state behavior. Under the sign of culture, a broad array of work focuses on the role of ideas, knowledge and culture itself in world politics and international conflict. So according to Samuel Huntington, current "civilizations" (Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and African) are reemerging as the main source of identity in international politics, the main future lines of world conflict will take the form of an impending "clash". Because nation-states are no longer able to provide, on their own, the economic well-being, political identity, and personal security citizens crave, people are looking for broader and deeper roots, roots which culture and civilizations can provide.

And in terms of Sino-American relations, Huntington has predicted that:

With the Cold War over, the underlying differences between China and the United States have reasserted themselves. A 'new Cold War' is under way between China and America. (Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,1996).

Shortcoming of this model sterns from oversimplification of the role of culture in a nation's international relations. According to this view, the US and China are doomed to misperceive and misunderstand each other, leading to geopolitical rivalry. Rarely however is culture a monolithic, static factor in a nation's foreign policy.

Where some scholars regard culture as the most important divider between the US and China. However, there is very little consensus as to the role played by culture in Chinese foreign policy. Some, tend to use Chinese traditional cultural traits (especially Confucianism) to analyze Chinese conflict behavior. Others, regard communist ideology and Maoism as the conceptual foundations of Chinese contemporary approaches to conflict. The two groups of scholars reach different conclusions regarding some key questions: Is the Chinese style of managing conflict non-confrontational or confrontational, or even hegemonic? Is it compromising or competitive and controlling? Is it results-oriented or principle-oriented?

But how can we filter out what is communist behavior from what is Chinese behavior from what is Confucian behavior?

For example, Alastair lain Johnston suggests that there was no pacifist bias in traditional Chinese strategic culture, and that China' s leaders have always regarded force as an important part of national prestige and survival. (Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, Princeton University Press, 1995).

On the other hand, some other scholars suggest that even today, the non-violent preaching of Confucian- Taoist philosophies manifest themselves in a general desire for accommodation over violence by China's leaders. However, culture is not timeless or changeless. Even Confucianism, has been shown to be an evolving doctrine. (We have demonstrated this on this website also with other old religious constructs.)

Also culture, is not a stable or homogenous pattern, nor is it merely a set of customs. The previously mentioned 2001 crisis over the "apology" issue for example, could not be ascribed simply to variant etiquette, moral law or cultural semantics regarding the concept of "apology." And none of the above theories fully address the six questions mentioned in our p.1.

Here we found that  David Shambaugh, and other  American China specialists who interviewed many Chinese military leaders in Beijing,  found that, a belief shared widely at all levels of military and political leadership- is that the United States during the three incidents we described, was trying to divide China territorially, subvert it politically, contain it strategically, and frustrate it economically. Like the other theories mentioned above we researched, and tested this from a 2005-06 perspective and found that indeed, from the standpoint of many Chinese people, the United States has a master plan against China.

The previously three China-U.S. crises, and especially the embassy bombing incident, viewed in the eyes of many Chinese nationalists today, are the best examples of the American conspiracy. Neither Chinese leaders nor the Chinese people seem to believe that the bombing of the Embassy was a technical mistake. Instead they perceived a vast conspiracy to conduct the bombing within the US government.

In addition, based on a discourse analysis focusing on a collection of 281 letters and  essays  e-mailed, faxed and mailed to the Guangming Daily one of China's major newspaper in the hours and days following the Belgrade bombing, Peter Hays Gries found that few Chinese accepted America's explanation that the bombing was a mistake caused by the CIA' s use of outdated maps. (Gries, "Tears of rage: Chinese nationalist reactions to the Belgrade embassy bombing," China Journal, No. 46, July 2001, p. 27.)

Another  large-N research with interviews of 62 individuals and a survey of 1,211 students was conducted in three elite Beijing universities about four months after the bombing incident. Dingxin Zhao's China Quarterly article about this, shows that the majority of the respondents strongly believed or believed that the embassy bombing was premeditated by either the US government (75.1 per cent) or the US military (77.8 per cent). Only 3.8 per cent of the respondents agreed that the bombing could be a technical error. Students were chosen as the sampie population because they have played a very important Tole in China's national politics. The survey was conducted in Beijing University, Qinghua University and People's University. Around 400 samples were taken from each university. They were selected because, although Beijing has 67 institutions of higher learning, these three are among the most prestigious and have exerted a great impact on students in other universities and on Chinese politics. (Zhao Dingxin, 2002 "An Angle on Nationalism in China today: Attitudes among Beijing Students after Belgrade 1999." China Quarterly. No.172: 49-69.)

Many agreed that the United States bombed the Chinese embassy because China was too weak, and more than half of the respondents (54.2 per cent) strongly agree or agree that the embassy bombing was intended to induce political instability in China.(ibid.)

It could be argued that students' views of the embassy bombing were shaped by government propaganda. However, not only the Chinese students in China helt this "theory of conspiracy." The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University have conducted an annual Foreign Policy Colloquium (FPC) for Chinese graduate students in the United States since 2002. The program is designed to acquaint participants with the manifold factors that influence the design and practice of American foreign policy. It accommodates up to 200 Chinese students to Washington D.C. each summer to interact with decision-makers, opinion-shapers, academics, and specialists.

When John Holdent the President of National Committee on US-China Relations was in China, and witnessed the student anti-U.S. demonstrations in Beijing during the embassy bombing crisis in May 1999, he told in an interview, that he was a little bit surprised that most of Chinese people he talked with did not accept the U.S. explanation about the bombing; and particularly that Professor Ezra Vogel, who teaches Chinese politics at Harvard University  told him that most Chinese students in Harvard also believed that the embassy bombing was intentional.

So Holden asked at the meeting: why did the Chinese students living in the U.S. who read the American newspapers and watch American TV news programs everyday share the same interpretation of this incident with the Chinese students living in China? He believes that one of the major reasons is because Chinese students are not familiar with the U.S. foreign policy decision-making processes and have some incorrect understanding. (Interview with John Holden, Duowei News Agency.)

However for China's foreign-policy decision-making, it is more important to find out how the Chinese leaders interpreted the Belgrade bombing. For this, Zhu Rongji’s data, published in the American journal in Chinese Law and Government, Vol. 35, No. 1-2, 2002, with a collection of hundreds of memos, speeches, notes and other secret documents smuggled out of Chinese Communist Party archives was particularly illuminating. These documents reveal what top Chinese decision-makers were thinking in 1999, especially during the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. As a New York Times' report comments, the text's appearance suggests there is a growing movement by a group of powerful Communist Party insiders to rewrite party history and influence China's future by leaking information to the West. (Craig S. Smith, "Tell-All Book Portrays Split in Leadership of China," New York Times, January 17, 2002.)

Many China scholars, including Andrew J. Nathan, the Columbia University political scientist who edited the English translation of what is indeed like a book, vouched for the authenticity and the integrity of the person or persons involved. One section, The Bombing of China's Embassy in Yugoslavia, provides detailed minutes of the emergency meeting of the Politburo standing committee which was held in the early morning of May 8, 1999, several hours after the bombing. The Standing Committee of Politburo is the party's supreme decision-making body, a group of seven to nine people who oversee the Communist Party of China. The power of the Committee resides largely in the fact that its members generally simultaneously hold positions within the People's Republic of China state positions. The full Politburo meets once a month and the standing committee meets weekly. This meeting of May 8 was an emergency meeting to discuss the situation and decide China's countermeasures. Each of the standing committee members shared their views of the situation and the countermeasures proposals. The minutes of the meeting include a detailed record of all the seven standing committee members' remarks. Below are those sections on this bombing incident with a brief introduction to each of them (Zang, pp.76-81.):

Li Peng (Chairman of the National People's Congress, ranked #2 in the Standing Committee of the Politburo): "Comrades! The bloodstained embassy incident is not an isolated matter and is not merely an insult and challenge to the Chinese people; it is a carefully crafted plot of subversion. The anti-China forces in the world are cunningly making use of various unfavorable factors both in and outside China to wantonly provoke disturbances. The United States is typical of those who 'take a foot when given an inch' and who 'bully the weak but fear the strong.' This incident, more than anything else, reminds us that the United States is an enemy. It is by no means a friend, as some say."

Hu Jintao (Vice President of PRC, ranked #5) talked mainly about the countermeasures; he emphasized that the most important thing now is to "persist in normal work and studies and hit back at the anti-China forces with real actions to reinvigorate China."

Li Lanqing (Vice Premier, ranked #7): "This is an open provocation to the people who have endured all the disasters of warfare and who love world peace. It is a serious challenge to the Chinese government! The Chinese people have never been afraid of threats, have always been able to overcome internal contradictions, unite, and take concerted action against foreign forces when faced with invasion or pressures from outside the country, have never submitted to any aggressors, and have always love peace but never feared war. In the future, direct confrontation between China and the United States will be unavoidable! The intention of the United States in doing this thing is quite obvious. It wants to sound China out and to create chaos in China. We must not play into their hands."

Li Ruihuan (Chainnan, Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, ranked #4): "The possibility cannot be excluded that this was a premeditated plot of the United States to create chaos in China, to have China's young people vent their hatred of the United States on the Chinese government. The Americans hope for nothing better than to provoke contradictions between the [Chinese] government and the broad masses of people, especially young students, and thereby shift the crisis In the face of the U.S. provocations, we must truly show the nation's strength and roar out that the Chinese people will not be humiliated."

Zhu Rongji (Premier, ranked #3): "Whatever the true reason for the bombing, there is no question that the United States feels absolutely no respect for China. Nor can the possibility be excluded that it is 'throwing a stone to prove the path' and sounding out China's strengths with a view to dealing a strategic blow at China. The United States is claiming over and over again that the bombing was merely an accident and is making various inept statements in an attempt to cover up its true intentions-statements that do not sound plausible even to Americans' ears. This is 'advancing a foot when given an inch' and barefaced bullying! I propose that Comrade Zemin deliver a statement and set the people's minds at ease. The embassy bombing is no more than a ploy used by the United States."

Wei Jianxing (chairman of the Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, ranked #6): "The bombing of our embassy was an out-and out violation of and trampling on our sovereignty. It is an insult to the dignity of the Chinese people. Chinese cannot remain silent any longer."

Jiang Zemin (President of PRC, Chairman of the CCP, ranked #1): "Why would they want to attack our embassy in Yugoslavia? Sino-U.S. relations have seen much improvement in recent years. The two sides have carried out mutual high-level visits and reached a common understanding on endeavors to set up a strategic partnership in the twenty-first century. Why is it that, under these circumstances of peace and detente, such a pernicious incident could take place? Is this an incidental and isolated occurrence?

If we analyze the world strategic set-up and the situation in the Asia-Pacific and surrounding regions, we will easily see that, by wantonly using guided missiles to attack our embassy in Yugoslavia, the United States is sounding out our support for the Yugoslav Federation and our reaction to, and stand on, international crises and conflicts. The United States wants, by means of this incident, to ascertain the strength of China's reaction to international crises and conflicts and especially to sudden incidents; to ascertain the voice of the people, the stance of public opinion, and the government's opinion, and the measures it will take. These things will serve the United States as important grounds for implementing the new NATO strategy, carrying out the U.S.-Japan security treaty, formulating its Asian-Pacific security strategy, and intervening in matters on China's periphery and even in China's internal affairs. Hence the air attack on our embassy in Yugoslavia may be part of an even greater plot, such as forcing China to become involved in these crises and conflicts, distracting China's attention from the "one center and two basic points" and causing China to be bogged down in upheavals or saddled with the heavy burden of warfare. We must have a clear understanding of the situation and accurately forecast and grasp developments. If we analyze Sino-U.S. relations from the perspective of international strategy, we must, of course, reserve the right to react strongly to the bombing of our embassy in Yugoslavia. ("One center" here means putting economic construction at the center of all Party work, and "two basic points" means upholding refrain and openness, on the one hand, and, on the other, upholding the "four cardinal principles". These are: the principle of upholding the socialist path, the people's democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought.)

A quick content analysis indicates that, in the remarks of the seven top leaders, five of them used the term ''provocation'' or "insult." Four of them described the bombing as "bullying.” And four of them directly called the bombing an U.S. ''plot” or ''ploy.'' None of them agreed with the U.S. explanation that the bombing was a technical error. For the seven China's top leaders, in their first responses to this incident, they saw it as an open provocation and insult to China and the Chinese people. Therefore, China must "roar out that the Chinese people will not be humiliated." One of them (Li Peng) declared that the incident was a "carefully crafted plot' of subversion. The majority of them agreed that ''the possibility cannot be excluded that it was a premeditated plot of the United States," or "may be part of an even greater plot." Many of them also talked about what the plot could do. According to their theories of conspiracy, the American plot could include:

(1) "To create chaos in China." The U.S. hoped to use this incident to provoke contradictions between the Chinese government and the broad masses of people.

(2) "Throwing a stone to probe the path." Using Jiang Zemin's words, the United States wants, by means of this incident, to ascertain the strength of China's reaction to international crises and conflicts; to ascertain the voice of the people, the stance of public opinion, and the government's opinion, and the measures it will take.

(3) Jiang even presumed that the air attack may be part of an even greater plot, such as  forcing China to become involved in these crises and conflicts, distracting China's attention from the economic development and causing China to be bogged down in upheavals or saddled with the heavy burden of warfare.
In fact a People's Daily editorial appeared on the first page of the newspaper on May 19, 1999, echoing the leaders' interpretations. "We have maintained stability and development, and made achievements that the enemy forces in the West could no longer tolerate. That is why they attempt to disquiet us, so as to take action against us in a time of chaos and with menace." (Chinese People's Awareness and Strength, People 's Daily, May 19, 1999, Page 1.)

Many of China's international analysts also shared their leaders' view that the U.S. wanted to use the bombing, “to create chaos in China." A Beijing-based governmental think tank for international security submitted to the top leadership an analysis report about this incident in which creating chaos in China was listed as the No. 1 motivation for the U.S. to bomb Chinese embassy. It agreed that the bombing was an intentional action and was approved by the U.S. top leaders.

 For updates click homepage here