Why Belgrade is cosying up to Beijing

Thousands of Serbs gathered outside the Palace of Serbia today to welcome the Chinese president Xi Jinping, chanting ‘China, Serbia’. Addressing the audience, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić thanked Xi for choosing to visit Serbia: ‘We are writing history today…[Xi] hasn’t come to Europe in five years and he has again chosen our little Serbia.’

The visit has been choreographed to coincide with the 25^th anniversary of Nato’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The strike killed three Chinese journalists and sparked mass protests across China. It is an incident China will never forget and has been a constant thorn in Sino-American relations. 

In a statement published yesterday in Serbia’s leading daily newspaper Politika, Xi said that China’s friendship with Serbia ‘is soaked in the shared blood of the two nations’. It is likely that he will take the opportunity to visit the former embassy, now a China Cultural Centre, to pay his respects to the dead and make a political point – that Nato is not a purely defensive alliance, and that China is far stronger now than it was then.