What are the long-term effects of the NATO bombing of the China embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999?
The key long term effect was that China finally realized that USA saw China as an enemy and a rival, and that nothing would change this view. Until that moment, the Chinese government’s attitude was “if we prove to be honest in our relations with the US and we ensure that our relations are based on the mutual benefit, Americans will accept and start respecting us which will result in a long term stability and prosperity”. When the Chinese embassy was bombed, the government and people finally realized that the US would always see China as an enemy and it doesn’t really matter what China does - the US attitude will never change.The official explanation of the US government was that they had old maps that showed a military facility at the location where the embassy was. No one in China or anywhere else believes that. Today, most Americans don’t even remember the incident (or the bombing of Serbia for that matter), because there were no American victims during the attack (as opposed to the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan). The US media rarely mentions this and describes the attack that resulted in 2000 deaths, destruction of 35% of the Serbia’s infrastructure and long term deaths as the result of depleted uranium usage as a “NATO intervention”. However, just because the US has swept this under the rug, it doesn’t mean that China has forgotten.