Mainland's Milosevic connection
By JASPER BECKER
Beijing's friendships in the Balkans are
nothing if not flexible. These days Chinese
sympathies are all with the plucky Serbs
and the mainland media has been whipping
up public support for Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic's heroic stand against
the West. Little is said about the ethnic
cleansing and the flight of the Albanian
Kosovar refugees or their struggling hosts
in Macedonia and Albania.
Yet for 15 years from the mid-1950s,
Albania was China's only friend and its
communist leader Enver Hoxha was Mao
Zedong's most loyal ally. Albanian films,
the only foreign movies shown on the
mainland, were the rage and fans dreamed
of meeting its stars, who daringly hinted at
intimacy between the sexes.
From the mid-1950s, the Serbs in Marshal
Josip Tito's Yugoslavia were reviled as
revisionists - but these days it is
Yugoslavian films which are screened, to
great applause.
Chinese Central Television is airing World
War II movies like The Bridge and Protect
Sarajevo which eulogise Tito's partisans.
Beijing's Capital cinema has shown a series
of such films called Yugoslavian Heroes
Come Back.
In the 1950s Mao, infuriated by Tito's
disloyalty to Josef Stalin, condemned him
as a traitor and was still more appalled
when in 1956 Belgrade voiced support for
the Hungarian uprising and condemned the
Soviet invasion.
That year fellow Stalinist Enver Hoxha
paid his first and only visit to Beijing,
forming a firm friendship with Mao that
became cast in cement in 1960 at the time
of the Sino-Soviet split. The two great
ex-guerilla commanders joined in opposing
Nikita Khrushchev for his revisionism and
co-operation with the West.
Mao's steadfast adherence to the Stalinist
line caused some misgivings even inside his
own Communist Party. Among those who
expressed doubts at local party branch
meetings was Zhu Rongji, who favoured
the workers' councils in factories which
Tito promoted. Soon afterwards Mr Zhu
was rounded up as "rightist" and
condemned to years of mucking out pigs
on a state farm.
Oddly enough this was also the time when
Beijing stood behind Albania's demand for
the hand of Kosovo and its Albanian
population. Hoxha claimed that during
World War II, when Tito's guerillas and
the Albanian partisans were together
fighting the Germans (who took over the
occupation of the region when the Italians
pulled out), Tito had promised that later
Kosovo would become part of a greater
Albania. The government in Tirana argued
that in 1944, the Kosovo Albanians had
staged an uprising against inclusion in the
Yugoslav Federation. Tito, backed by a
powerful army, strongly rejected these
claims.
Albania was isolated in Europe and its only
friend was far away in China. Still, as Dr
Tahir Elezi, former Albanian ambassador
in Beijing recalls, the Chinese love for
Albanians knew no bounds in the 1950s.
"I was here as a student and one day was
walking in Tiananmen Square when people
saw a foreigner and asked me where I was
from. When I told them I was from
Albania, a cheering crowd lifted me on to
their shoulders and tossed me in the air,"
he said.
China also lavished military and civilian aid
on Albania, sending thousands of experts
to build factories, roads and ports.
Between 1956 and 1982, poverty-stricken
China gave a total of US$27 billion worth
of aid divided among Albania and friends
in North Korea, North Vietnam and
Romania.
In those days, the Chinese sang a song,
"Long live Chairman Mao Zedong, long
live Enver Hoxha, long live the Communist
Party, long live Beijing-Tirana".
The Albanians sponsored the resolution at
the United Nations to give China its seat
there and its permanent place in the
Security Council. Hoxha even launched his
own "Ideological and Cultural Revolution".
Yet as he confided to his diary, he became
baffled by almost everything that went on
China. In his great work Reflections On
China which ran to two volumes with
1,600 pages, Hoxha recorded his growing
unease during the 1970s as Mao's closest
allies such as Marshal Lin Biao and Chen
Boda suddenly disappeared from the scene
only to be labelled as traitors and
capitalists.
Worse, Hoxha was angered by the
gyrations in China's foreign policy. In the
early 1970s he called premier Zhou Enlai
"the Iago of Chinese politics" when he
began pushing for a "Yugoslav-Albanian
Defensive Alliance". Then, when Mao held
talks with US president Richard Nixon, the
news reached him "like a bombshell".
When Deng Xiaoping began re-aligning
Chinese policies and cancelling aid to
Albania in 1977, the friendship ended in a
bitter public row. That year Tito made his
first and only state visit to China and
became China's dearest friend in the
Balkans. The two sides re-established
party-to-party relations and ordinary
Chinese first became enamoured of
Yugoslavian films.
Mainland reformers were also fascinated
by the Yugoslavian way and the
experiments in worker management
councils. Hundreds of delegations went to
see them in action. Inside China banners
were raised that said "Learn from
Yugoslavia" and the Capital Iron & Steel
Works (Shougang) in Beijing was
designated a base for such experiments.
The Yugoslavian model was finally
rejected by Zhao Ziyang in 1987 and
relations remained cool until the
mid-1990s, when China adopted a more
stridently anti-American tone. Beijing
began to take a greater interest in Mr
Milosevic's defiance of the West. Little
was reported about the atrocities
committed by Serbian forces and instead
Mr Milosevic's wife, Mira Markovic,
became a welcome visitor in China. More
of a communist ideologue than her
husband, three of her books were
published in Chinese.
Bilateral ties reached a high point in
November 1997, when Mr Milosevic
arrived in Beijing on a state visit almost
immediately after President Jiang Zemin
returned from his state visit to the United
States. Mr Jiang told Mr Milosevic that
bilateral ties had clearly withstood the test
of time and that China "respects the
choices of the Yugoslav people,
appreciates the nation's independent
domestic and foreign policies and admires
the indomitable spirit of its people".
Premier Zhu, who had paid for his
friendship to the Yugoslavs earlier in his
career, praised Mr Milosevic as a
"statesman" and the two countries signed a
joint statement in which Belgrade
recognised Beijing's claims to Taiwan.
Afterwards there were reports, which were
denied, that China had agreed to sell
medium-range missiles to Serbia.
China's role in the former Yugoslavia
became more prominent in February,
when the new breakaway state of
Macedonia declared it would recognise
Taiwan, not Beijing. Taiwan had
reportedly promised US$300 million
(HK$2.3 billion) in aid and proposed
investments worth US$1.6 billion.
Consequently, Beijing used its UN veto to
block the renewal of the mandate for a UN
peacekeeping force stationed in
Macedonia. Instead the force, largely of
European troops, became the Nato force
which is now helping refugees.
Beijing is now praising Mr Milosevic as a
war hero. Party newspapers are full of
articles comparing his resistance to Nato
airstrikes to that of Tito's heroic exploits
against the Nazi war machine. Photos of
US President Bill Clinton in newspapers
show him with a short Hitler moustache
looking down on a sea of fire.
But the Worker's Daily calls Mr Milosevic
"a man with iron in his blood" and said
people were gasping with admiration.
"Not only is he tough in action but shows a
rare loyalty to the Communist Party," it
said, adding he had "a very nice and
capable wife whose parents were both
intimate colleagues of Tito".
Chinese experts appear on mainland
television news night after night praising
his record as a peace-maker in
Bosnia-Herzegovina and casting him as a
victim of American hegemonism. "He is
only made a war criminal by Western
countries because he refused to make
concessions on Kosovo," the newspaper
said.
The People's Daily lays the entire blame
for the crisis on Nato. "All people with a
conscience now realise that Nato which
claims to 'relieve humanitarian disasters' is
actually creating new ones. The civilians of
Yugoslavia are the biggest victims of
Nato's naked invasion," it said in an
editorial.
Nato is accused of using the crisis to try
out new weapons. Experts like Professor
Zhang Zhaozhong, of the National
Defence University, said: "Nato is
ridiculous. The refugee exodus was caused
by its airstrike and now it is saying that it
has to keep bombing so as to stop the
refugee exodus."
Even Soccer News has urged football
teams to learn from the heroic Serbs. "The
guerilla war and team spirit shown by
heroes like Tito are now being displayed. It
is amazing to see how much support they
give to their leader Milosevic. Wanda
football team should learn from them so as
to fight their way out of trouble," it said.
When the coach of Shandong's team, the
former national coach of Yugoslavia,
appeared in the stadium, the paper
reported thousands stood chanting
pro-Yugoslavian slogans.
The Beijing Daily printed slogans for fans
to shout at the Workers' Stadium: "Victory
to Yugoslavia", "Yugoslavia straighten
your back and stride forward", and
"Balkan Peace Now".
Most ordinary Chinese also say they
support the government's position and
blame the US for the war although a few
are puzzled why allied bombing of Iraq
failed to produce such a refugee crisis.
The argument that the leader of any state
is justified in doing whatever necessary to
stop ethnic separatist movements is widely
accepted.
Yet despite public support, Beijing has
been careful to do nothing to actually help
either the Serbs or the Albanians, offering
no financial or material aid. Attempts by
pro-Serbian supporters to stage rallies
outside the American Embassy were also
quickly stopped.
"The Chinese are ready to defend Serbia
down to the last Russian," joked one
observer. Premier Zhu noticeably did not
cancel his visit to the US as his Russian
counterpart Yevgeny Primakov did.
China is determined to oppose Nato
becoming the "world's policeman" with a
mandate to intervene anywhere in the
world in defence of human rights and
democracy. It is worried that a similar
military alliance, between America and
Japan, could use the Kosovo crisis as
precedent to intervene one day on behalf
of Taiwan, which Beijing regards as its
own breakaway province.
Of course, the crisis in Europe helps to
distract the Americans from the Taiwan
issue and other potential ethnic disputes in
Xinjiang, Tibet and the rest of the region.
But what the Kosovo crisis threatens most
is Beijing's view of history, that the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the web
of alliances in Europe brought an end to
the Cold War - in response to those who
would now paint Beijing as the enemy.
Mainland foreign affairs experts tell
television audiences that Nato, which it
was expected would dissolve after the
USSR break-up, is deliberately fostering
the Kosovo crisis in order to finally crush
the communist state in Europe.
With Serbia cast in the role that Albania
once was, as the last Stalinists in Europe,
an impression is conveyed of history
repeating itself, with China keen to
demonstrate it has an isolated, small, but
doughty ideological friend in the Balkans.
Only the names have changed since the
1950s but then how many Chinese are
going to remember just who those far
away Albanians and Serbs really are?