The CIA blamed bad mapping but China has never believed that the strikes were an accident.
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They were lucky, some thought, to live just next to the Chinese embassy - an important diplomatic mission. Being there would surely protect them. He arrived to a scene of chaos. The embassy was burning; workers covered in blood and dust were climbing out of windows to escape. Politicians close to Milosevic - who had been charged two weeks earlier with crimes against humanity by an international tribunal - were already arriving to denounce the bombing as the latest example of Nato barbarity.
A third journalist, 48-year-old Shao Yunhuan, of the Xinhua news agency, also died. Her husband, Cao Rongfei, was blinded. The embassy's military attaché, who is believed to have run an intelligence cell from the building, was sent back to China in a coma. In total, three people were killed and at least 20 injured.
But, as former Nato officials point out, in 20 years no clear evidence has come to light proving what almost all of China believes and America strenuously denies: that it was deliberate. The real target, officials said, was the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement - a state agency that imported and exported defence equipment. The grey office building is still there today - hundreds of metres down the road from the embassy site.
Had anyone on the ground visited the site to be bombed they would have found a gated compound, a five-storey building with a green-tiled oriental sloped roof, a bronze plaque announcing the embassy's presence and a large, bright red Chinese flag fluttering more than 10 metres in the air.
The diplomat rushed from his residence to the embassy down the road, where US officials were trying to figure out what had happened. Something had clearly gone wrong but this must have been,"It was so patently obvious that it was a sort of fog of war accident… At that point I didn't think that down the road this was going to be a major problem. Obviously, it was a major problem, but not the sort of convulsive incident that it turned out to be," said Rank.
"They were pulling up the paving stones. Beijing sidewalks aren't paved, they have big tiles and they were pulling those up and smashing them and throwing them over the walls."Many of those bits of concrete were crashing through the windows of a building where more than a dozen embassy staff, including US Ambassador James Sasser, had hunkered down. Embassy cars were being defaced and attacked.
In a rare TV address Vice-President Hu Jintao endorsed the protests but also warned they had to remain"in accordance with the law".US Ambassador James Sasser was trapped in the embassy for four days as protests raged The fired-up students drew lots to choose who could attend. They were loaded onto buses and given statements to read that echoed the stilted official language being broadcast by state media."They gave us long sentences. But in the street, to speak out in long sentences is very hard." He decided to yell slogans about the evils of Nato and the US instead.
"The anger that ordinary Chinese felt I think can only be understood in that historical context, being socialised to resent the West," said Peter Gries, a professor of Chinese politics at Manchester University and an expert on Chinese nationalism.
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