In China, Anger Toward U.S. Inflamed

BEIJING —  To the West, the latest incarnation of Adolf Hitler is Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, whose Serbian soldiers stand accused of massacring ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

But here in China, the man whose image was doctored to make him look like the Nazi dictator is none other than President Clinton.

“The specter hovering over Kosovo,” read the caption below the photo in Sunday’s Yangcheng Evening News, a popular daily in southern China. The altered image, printed on the front page of the paper’s weekly news supplement, depicted Clinton with a toothbrush mustache and a jutting jaw. Inside the paper, by contrast, Milosevic was hailed as a hero.

The scathing portrait of Clinton was the harshest attack yet on the U.S.-led airstrikes on Yugoslavia. Although China has not witnessed the kind of anti-American protests seen in Russia, opposition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s military campaign has run high here from the outset.

In fact, anger over the NATO bombings nearly scuttled this week’s visit to the U.S. by Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji. Some in the Beijing leadership apparently regarded the military action as the last straw in a steadily worsening Sino-U.S. relationship--a relationship already roiled by allegations of Chinese spying, illegal campaign donations and human rights violations. Zhu reportedly went ahead with the trip only after a Politburo discussion last week.

The airstrikes touch a raw nerve in China because the Communist regime fears that NATO support of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo could augur Western intervention in the separatist troubles confronting China itself, in areas such as Tibet, the northwestern region of Xinjiang and in Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province.

On Thursday, the Chinese media kept up their barrage of criticism of the NATO campaign--although, in a possible nod to the hoped-for success of Zhu’s visit, the comments were placed on inside pages of the newspapers.

The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, labeled the Western powers “hawks” and “hegemonists” who “simply do not care” about the civilians who have been killed or displaced in Kosovo.

“In their eyes, a war is only a live-ammunition drill,” the newspaper said. “This time, however, NATO cannot make the Serbs submit, despite employing so many advanced weapons.”

Last week, articles castigating the NATO bombings were splashed across the front page of the official China Daily newspaper, including results of a state-sponsored poll that found a majority of respondents opposed to the military action as “an unjustified, detestable invasion.”

In the survey, nearly 70% of respondents accused the U.S. of pursuing a “hegemonism-motivated” policy toward Yugoslavia and engaging in “saber-rattling in its role as an international policeman.” The poll, which canvassed 2,000 residents in China’s five biggest cities, was conducted by the state-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

And in Sunday’s Yangcheng Evening News--the edition that painted Clinton as Hitler--articles lauded Milosevic as a “folk hero” who dares to stand up to the West.