Chinese President Xi Jinping lashed out at NATO for its blatant attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, as he sought to cement ties with Serbia ahead of a visit to the Balkan country on Tuesday .
Xi, who is traveling to Europe for the first time in five years, will travel to Serbia on Tuesday afternoon from the French Pyrenees, where French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed him on the last day of a three-day state visit In France.
In a letter published in Serbian media outlet Politika, Xi on Tuesday invoked the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War to call for unity between Beijing and Belgrade.
Twenty-five years ago today, NATO blatantly bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalists… We should never forget it, Xi said, according to an English version of the article. The Sino-Serbian friendship, forged with the blood of our compatriots, will remain in the common memory of the Chinese and Serbian people.
The district of Belgrade, where the former embassy was located, was decorated on Tuesday with Chinese and Serbian flags. At a small demonstration this week, two Serbian communist parties hung banners welcoming the Chinese president, including one suggesting similarities between Serbia and China: Kosovo is Serbia, Taiwan is China.
Belgrade says its former province broke away illegally, while Beijing claims Taiwan as part of its territory and is working to bring it under its control.
Xi's European trip, which will also include Hungary, is seen by analysts as aimed at exploiting differences on the continent with Russia and the United States and potentially undermining NATO and EU unity on China.
Chinese academics have praised Macron's advocacy for a more independent European position on the world stage, while Serbia and Hungary are seen as more pro-Russian despite the war in Ukraine.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vui, who will host Xi, was former leader Slobodan Miloevi's propaganda minister during the NATO bombing of Belgrade.
The bombing remains a source of lingering resentment in Serbia toward NATO and the United States in particular, said Milos Damnjanovic, an analyst at BIRN, a Belgrade think tank. [It] creates a feeling of solidarity between China and Serbia.
NATO said the Chinese embassy bombing was an accident during a war to protect Kosovars from Serbian aggression.
China is the largest foreign investor in Serbia and accounts for 8.5 percent of Belgrade's foreign loans, according to Branimir Jovanovic, a researcher at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies.
In a way, it is a failure of the EU and the West in general that China occupies such a place, Jovanovic said. The West leaves a space in which China is more than willing to establish itself.
The EU adopted on Tuesday a 6 billion growth plan for the six countries of the Western Balkans. But the deal comes with conditions for Serbia, including an obligation to improve relations with Kosovo, making it less attractive than Chinese financing which does not include such conditions.
Serbian European affairs expert Duan Relji called the EU package much ado about nothing, saying it represented a negligible 0.3 percent of the region's GDP and was so complex that it was practically unusable.
Chinese media widely covered Xi's trip to Europe. People's Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, quoted him as telling Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday that China's overcapacity problem did not exist in response to Western concerns about possible dumping of subsidized Chinese products.
Macron and his wife had lunch with Xi and his wife at a mountain restaurant in the Pyrenees, near the village where the French president's grandmother is buried. The lunch was intended to be a more personal meeting, similar to a visit Macron made last year to Guangzhou for a tea ceremony with Xi in a city where the Chinese president's father had resided.
During Xi's visit, French and Chinese companies signed deals, including metro construction contracts for Frances Alstom. Shares of French cognac makers Pernod Ricard and Rémy Cointreau rose on Tuesday, after France was granted a temporary reprieve from threats of special Chinese tariffs on EU brandy imports.
Yanmei Xie, an analyst at Beijing consultancy Gavekal, argued that Xi's talks with Macron would do little to change the course of China-EU relations since structural tensions over trade and the war in Ukraine would persist.
China's importance as an export market for the EU is declining compared to that of the United States, Xie said.
Europe will only become more aligned with the United States, both for security and economic growth, she said. Macron's attempt to establish a relationship with Xi in the Pyrenees will change nothing.
Additional reporting by Sarah White in Paris
