July 23, 1999	atimes.com

China CHINA FOR REAL By Bradley Martin Asia Times Online Embassy bombing 'part of espionage war' On June 2 Asia Times Online's Uwe Parpart laid out on this site a case for the proposition that the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had been intentional. Now comes the Chinese-language Hong Kong magazine Kai Fang to flesh out that theory further. In its latest issue, Kai Fang concludes that U.S. intelligence decided to take out a high-tech electronic espionage unit in the embassy because the unit's intelligence was too good for Washington's taste - it was not only a threat during the Balkans war then raging, but also was likely to be of considerable help in Beijing's longer-term efforts to catch up with the United States as a military power. The magazine argues that it must have been thanks to the embassy listening post's findings that Serbian forces had been able to down an F-117 stealth fighter. The pride and joy of the U.S. Air Force, the aircraft was considered not to be vulnerable to the Serbs' own, unaided anti-aircraft capabilities, Tai Fang says. So Washington acted decisively, unwilling to endure more of such heavy losses and determined to deprive China of the intelligence bonanza that the embassy's listening unit had been reaping. Kai Fang backs up its argument that the embassy housed an extremely important listening post by citing a June 23 article in China's Guangming Ribao. Entitled ''Chinese Military Attaches Amid the Flames of War,'' the Guangming Ribao article reported that the entire Beijing leadership had shown ''great concern'' over the fate of a Belgrade embassy military attache who was missing after the blast. Military headquarters in Beijing and the foreign ministry secretly sent out an order that ''Ren Baokai has to be sought out at whatever cost.'' When he was found, injured, under the ruins, Beijing sought special medical treatment for the attache from the Yugslav Military Medical University. Then, four days later, Ren was flown home on a special plane to be received by leaders including President Jiang Zemin. All this is according to Guangming Ribao - which Kai Fang says inadvertently tipped Beijing's hand by publishing the article. The Hong Kong magazine surmises that all the concern shown for the military attache related to a secret mission. The mission, it suggests, was to gather information on the military activities of the U.S. and its allies using electronic interception equipment. Chinese personnel had done precisely that earlier, during the Gulf War, operating from embassies in Turkey and Iraq. The Gulf War missions had been so successful as to intercept intelligence that the ground war phase of the fighting was about to start, five days in advance, Kai Fang claims. A second clue cited by Kai Fang is the recent transfer of Ji Shengde from the directorship of military intelligence to a lesser post. Foreign analysts have tied that demotion to Ji's involvement in the political funding scandal involving U.S. President Bill Clinton's Democratic Party. Kai Fang says that's wrong because the campaign funding scandal is a U.S. domestic issue, never a bilateral issue, and there would be no reason to dump Ji on that account. Rather, it asserts, Ji took the rap for misjudging the U.S. response to the embassy's spying - and for losing the hard-to-replace data that had been stored in the embassy spy center. The assumption that diplomatic cover would keep Washington from striking was wrong - because the Americans really had no choice other than a surgical strike if they wanted to avoid further heavy losses, Tai Fang says. Trying to resolve the matter diplomatically with Beijing would have been ''like asking a tiger for its skin." Tai Fang says Beijing's goal now is to put the incident in the past - because to keep it in front of intense public attention much longer would invite criticism within China of the regime's misjudgment. But then, the magazine notes, the Clinton administration will have a similar problem if it has to keep repeating its for-the-record explanation of what happened in Belgrade. ''How can the world's number one superpower, which prepares to lead the whole world into the 21st century, be so dumb or so careless as to use an outdated map and end up bombing the embassy of another power?" The magazine is not one of those Beijing-owned Hong Kong publications. It has in the past pursued tacks that Beijing would not encourage - and on occasion has taken pro-Taiwan positions. Its version could be a cleverly concocted conspiracy theory that someone wants to peddle in order to play up Sino-U.S. problems. On the other hand, there may be something to it. Journalists as spies While the United States prohibits its intelligence agencies from using U.S. news organizations' staff journalists as spies, many other countries have no such scruples. China, in particular, has done more and more of that over the years, according to the same article in Kai Fang. Washington recently leaked to the U.S. media information that two of the three Chinese reporters killed in the Belgrade bombing, Shao Yunhuan of Xinhua and Xu Xinghu of Guangming Ribao, were in fact intelligence agents. (The third fatality was Xu's wife.) The spokesman for China's embassy in Washington tried to refute the leaked allegation by noting that both men had filed numerous news reports on the Kosovo war. But Kai Fang says China's use of reporters in intelligence activities is ''an open secret'' and the magazine offers a fascinating mini-history of the practice. In the beginning of the People's Republic, in the 1950s, the Central Investigation Department looked for news reporters who had promise as spies, trained them as intelligence pros and sent them overseas. In addition, already serving agents were placed as journalists with either Xinhua or Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), where they were given a year or two of training in the news trade before being dispatched abroad. In the 1980s when the Ministry of State Security was established, says Tai Fang, the ministry started sending agents overseas with news-gatherer identities without bothering to clear it with the news organizations involved. Of course that created all sorts of confusion, and Deng Xiaping himself was called upon to mediate. Deng decreed that any spooks slated for overseas work under journalistic cover must learn the journalist's trade first by working in the news organizations involved - getting back to something like the old practice. Despite that barrier, the numbers of spies sent abroad under news-gathering cover virtually exploded starting in the late '80s. Not only Xinhua and People's Daily but all sorts of obscure news organizations have put spies on their overseas payrolls, Kai Fang reports. War coming? Don't hold your breath China has been talking up a storm about how Taiwan's president risks war with his attempt to establish the one-country, two-states formula. Major General Su Jing, deputy chief of staff of the Nanjing Military Region, for example, got thoroughly worked up during a civilian boat mobilization exercise and delivered himself of this zinger: ''If Li Teng-hui continues to propagate 'Taiwan independence,' or pursue a one-China, one-Taiwan policy, he definitely will ruin himself by playing with fire, and drown himself in a boundless ocean of the people's war." Whew! Block that metaphor! But does Beijing really expect war? It would seem not, if you listen to some prominent mainland academics who attended a Macau seminar last week on ''China consciousness and Taiwan consciousness." Oh, the scholars did vent the usual saber-rattling rhetoric: Taiwan's President Li is gambling with the lives of 22 million Taiwan compatriots, blah blah blah. And they discussed war scenarios. But . . . nah. One of the deep-thinkers, Cai Jiarui, director of Tianjin University's Taiwan Research Center, ''pointed out that although the possibility has emerged of a cross-strait war, it is not very great,'' according to an account of the meeting in Hong Kong's Beijing-owned daily Ta Kung Pao. Reason? The Taiwanese themselves aren't likely to take things that far. Li Jiaquan of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences likewise got off a few war-drum rolls, warning that the Taiwanese leader had pushed matters ''to the brink'' - but then calmed down and talked long-term: Next on the agenda for the mainland, scholar Li said, is a hearts-and-minds exercise to win over the Taiwanese people, misguided as they are on account of their leader's foolhardiness. Just good sports Here's a bit more on Beijing's wish to cool down its disputes with Washington. Xinhua reports that Wang Junsheng, a deputy chairman of the Chinese Soccer Association, stated that China would not make an official complaint with international soccer's governing body, even though a CNN videotape shows the referee failed to notice rules violations by the U.S. women's team in their narrow victory over China in Pasadena earlier this month. (To view the June 2 Asia Times Online article suggesting the embassy bombing could have been intentional,click here.)

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