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The Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand Volume II - 2010 Sitthiphon Kruarattikan 39 could still combine with a potential societal push for quality information and wider participation in public affairs”. Therefore, what the Chinese government and the CCP call “pacifist foreign policy” might not always be supported by their own citizens. An indication of differences between official foreign policy orthodoxy and public opinion occurred in 1996 with the publication of China Can Say No, a book edited by Zhang Xiaobo. On the one hand, the book criticized American aims to contain China’s growth; e.g. the CIA secret mission in China, the support for Tibet’s independence, the protracted negotiation over China’s bid to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). On the other hand, it also charged that the Chinese government was naïve and soft in its dealing with the United States, and that it should dare to “say no” to Washington (Fewsmith and Rosen, 2001: 163). The book quickly became a bestseller, selling as many as 2 million copies, reflecting that many people read it and shared the same frustrations as the authors. A few years later, their frustrations resulted in an outburst of protests against foreign powers. Anti-American Protests in 1999 Claiming that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had committed genocide crime in the province of Kosovo, the Bill Clinton administration, on behalf of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), began its war with Serbia in March 1999. On May 7 of that year, the Chinese Embassy in Serbia’s capital city of Belgrade was bombed by NATO’s air force, leading to the deaths of three embassy personnel and the injuries to more than twenty. The next day, hundreds of thousands of people protested in cities across China, attacked the US Embassy in Beijing with stones and eggs, burnt the American flag, and shouted “kill Americans” (Hughes, 2006: 85). The Belgrade Incident became a dilemma for the Chinese leadership. On the one hand, the government at that time wanted to sign an agreement with the US on the terms of China’s WTO accession by the end of 1999, which would be a symbol of President Jiang Zemin’s success in integrating China into the global economic system on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As a result, the Chinese leadership did not want to overreact to the incident. On the other hand, however, banning a protest was not an option because the protesters might see it as a “weakness” of their leaders and redirect their outburst of anger at their own government, or even question the legitimacy of the CCP’s authoritarian rule.