646 { China’s Quest
behind Falun Gong. The MSS reported that Falun Gong leader Li Hongzhi
had personally been in Beijing for several days before the April 25 “conver-
gence,” Jiang told the Politburo. Moreover, “Forces abroad were involved be-
hind the scenes in Falungong’s convergence on Zhongnanhai ... This is part
of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s strategy designed to split China.”^18
During the same month as the Falun Gong confrontation, the United States
introduced to the UN Human Rights Commission a resolution condemning
human rights violations in China. The United States had abstained from such
an action the previous year.^19 Here was further evidence for the PBSC that the
United States was fomenting disorder in China.
Two weeks after the CIA masterminded the Falun Gong convergence on
CCP headquarters, or so it apparently seemed to CCP leaders, US leaders
ordered another move designed to instigate disorder in China, a bombing
attack on China’s embassy in Belgrade—again, so it seemed to China’s lead-
ers. From the deeply paranoid perspective of Jiang Zemin and Li Peng, the
purpose of the embassy bombing, which was assumed to be intentional, was
to bring Chinese into the streets so that secret underground counterrevolu-
tionary organizations like Falun Gong could misdirect popular anger toward
the regime. As Andrew Nathan concludes, “A number of the Chinese leaders
seriously believed that the Americans had bombed the embassy in order to
stir up a storm of nationalism that would topple the leaders from power.”^20
The international background of the CCP confrontation with Falun Gong
and the bombing of the PRC Belgrade embassy was Western military inter-
vention in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) to halt the ethnic cleans-
ing underway in the Kosovo region of that state. Kosovo was an ethnically
mixed Serbian and Albanian region, with many of the latter being Muslims.
In 1999, the region still remained part of the rump Yugoslav state, after most
of the other republics of the former Yugoslav state had already become inde-
pendent. As agitation for Kosovan autonomy or independence grew in early
1999, Serbian militias linked to Slobodan Milošević, the dictator of rump
Yugoslavia, began massacring ethnic Albanians in a desperate attempt to
hold that region for Yugoslavia. The European nations and the United States
felt strongly that ethnic cleansing, genocide in fact, could not be allowed to
continue on the continent of Europe, and that effective intervention to end it
was imperative. The violence associated with the breakup of Yugoslavia was
the first war to stain European soil since 1945 and was deemed a major chal-
lenge to European leaders, who were loath to simply let such violence burn
itself out. The tardy and often inadequate response of the Western countries
to the Yugoslav civil wars earlier in the 1990s was of deep moral and political
concern to European leaders, who felt that the very future of Europe as an
area of peace was at stake. Western leaders concluded that military interven-
tion was imperative to stop the massacres in Kosovo for both humanitarian
and security reasons. From Beijing’s perspective, this seemed like Western