Xi Jinping lashes out at NATO over 1999 Belgrade bombing ahead of Serbia visit

“Twenty-five years ago today, NATO flagrantly bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalists. This we should never forget. The China-Serbia friendship, forged with the blood of our compatriots, will stay in the shared memory of the Chinese and Serbian peoples,” the Financial Times (FT) quoted Xi as saying.

The London daily said that the Belgrade neighborhood home to the former embassy was on Tuesday decked in Chinese and Serbian flags and that the activists of the League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ) and New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (NKPJ) on Monday hung banners outside the Chinese Cultural Center, now at this site, to welcome the Chinese president, including one suggesting similarities between Serbia and China: “Kosovo is Serbia — Taiwan is China,” and one saying the street of “Chinese victims of the NATO aggression.”

The Chinese president ended his visit to France and is due in Serbia on Tuesday evening for a two-day visit as part of his mini European tour, during which he will also visit Hungary.

On the second day of the Chinese president's state visit, French President Emmanuel Macron and Xi headed to the Pyrenees for a private part of the visit, during which they were able to discuss more directly the war in Ukraine and trade disputes.

Analysts believe that Xi’s European trip aims to exploit differences on the continent towards Russia and the US and to potentially undermine the unity of NATO and the EU on China.

Chinese academics have praised Macron’s advocacy of a more independent European stance on the global stage, while Serbia and Hungary are seen as more pro-Russia despite the Ukraine war, reported the daily.

The Financial Times said that China is the biggest foreign investor in Serbia and accounts for 8.5 per cent of Belgrade’s foreign loans, according to Branimir Jovanovic, a researcher at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies.
“In a way this is a failure of the EU and the west in general that China is so prominent. The west leaves space that China is more than willing to step into,” Jovanovic said.

The FT reported that the EU on Tuesday adopted a €6bn growth package for the six countries of the western Balkans, but which comes with strings attached for Serbia, including a requirement to improve relations with Kosovo, making it less attractive than Chinese funding that comes without such conditions.

EU affairs expert Dusan Reljic told the FT that the EU package was “much ado about nothing”, saying it amounted to a negligible 0.3 per cent of the region’s GDP and was so complex as to be virtually unusable.