-Caveat Lector-
"China has broken off diplomatic contacts with Washington."
"U.S. official travel to China has been suspended."
China Walks Fine Line With Protests
By JOHN LEICESTER
.c The Associated Press
BEIJING (AP) -- In unleashing indignant crowds of stone-throwing students on
the U.S. Embassy, Chinese leaders have allowed the nation to vent some deeply
felt anger. But they have also taken a risk.
Since crushing massive pro-democracy demonstrations on Tiananmen Square 10
years ago, Chinese leaders have forbidden large-scale protests, fearing they
could quickly spiral out of control.
But stopping people from demonstrating after NATO accidentally bombed the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade late Friday could have been just as hazardous:
Emotions could have turned against the government, which might have looked
weak and out-of-touch with the public mood.
``We're just coming out here to smash up some bricks to show our anger,''
said a protesting worker, who only gave his surname, Wang. ``We wish our
officials would be stronger.''
In opting to allow protests, Chinese leaders also put in certain controls.
It's mostly students who have been allowed to march on the U.S. and British
embassies, not ranks of burly workers that police would have found harder to
handle.
Authorities ferried students on buses to the embassy district, and police
allowed them to hurl rocks and smash cars -- but prevented anyone from
storming the embassy gates.
It's hard to see a bright future for U.S.-China relations. The bombing of the
Chinese Embassy, which killed three people, and the subsequent protests in
Beijing and torching of a U.S. consulate in southwest China come on top of a
wide range of problems between Beijing and Washington.
Allegations -- hotly denied by Beijing -- that China stole U.S. nuclear
weapons secrets have hardened anti-China sentiment in the U.S. Congress.
There are also persistent tensions over Taiwan, human rights, and U.S.
research into an anti-missile system that Beijing fears could spark an arms
race.
With public emotions running high, China said today it was breaking off
diplomatic contacts with Washington on human rights, arms control, weapons
proliferation and international security.
The tougher attitude towards Washington may prevent Chinese leaders from
making the concessions U.S. negotiators are seeking before China is admitted
to the World Trade Organization.
In another sign of how the protests were complicating U.S.-China ties, U.S.
official travel to China was suspended.
State-run Chinese media helped set the angry public mood. Their coverage of
the Kosovo conflict has often been belligerently anti-American. State media
have focused heavily on Yugoslav casualties from NATO attacks, not on the
plight of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian refugees.
Having let the protest genie out of the bottle, China will inevitably seek to
get it back in again: The 10th anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen
crackdown is approaching, and the government will very likely take whatever
steps are necessary to prevent demonstrations on that sensitive date.
Allowing protests to go on too long also carries with it the risk of them
getting bigger, and angrier.
``We must prevent overreaction,'' Vice President Hu Jintao said Sunday in a
nationwide televised address.
EDITOR'S NOTE: John Leicester has been a Beijing-based correspondent for The
Associated Press since 1996.
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