Leading Article: Nato must stand firm in the face of Chinese pressure

IMAGINE IF the British embassy in some South-east Asian country were blown up by a stray Chinese missile. Imagine the outcry. Britain would expect more than an apology and an offer to replant the Ambassador's rose garden. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the Chinese intend to extract the maximum amount of diplomatic flesh from the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

The content of the Chinese demands, however, has more to do with events in China than with those in the Balkans. The longer the war in Kosovo goes on, the clearer it is that the politics of countries outside the conflict become tangled up in it. From the start, Boris Yeltsin, Russia's President, has frustrated his Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, from gaining any advantage in the forthcoming presidential elections through bringing the war to an acceptable end. And meanwhile, Russia's nationalists have found the war a heaven-sent recruiting campaign.

Similarly in China, Kosovo is the focus for old conflicts. The war exacerbates the divisions between the ageing Maoists - with their unswerving hatred of America - and those, such as the Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, who Tony Blair has gone so far as to claim as a moderniser. For Peking, the conflict also has uncomfortable parallels with the separatist movements among the Muslim minorities in Western Sinkiang - let alone reminding the regime of its brutal and condemned reign in Tibet. Thus, the Chinese opposition to Nato's campaign in Yugoslavia is moved less by ideology than by the fear that Kosovo sets dangerous precedents for both international relations and the loyalty of its own minority peoples.

Until this blunder, the Western powers had assumed that China would acquiesce in any plan that the Russians agreed to; that disappeared the moment the bomber pilot launched the missile at the embassy in Belgrade. China is now demanding that Nato stops bombing before she will green-light any UN-sanctioned ground force. Given that Nato has expressly refused to halt its campaign before the Yugoslav army drives back to its barracks in Serbia, the diplomatic terrain seems almost as impassable as the mountains around Kosovo.

In the short term, the Chinese will use the blow against their sovereign territory to ratchet up the pressure on Nato until continuing the bombing becomes painful. Nato is already spending some pounds 45m a day to fight this war (pounds 2m of it coming from British taxpayers). The Western allies will not sustain such spending for much longer without some sign of an end to the conflict. In the medium term, Peking may seek to force Washington to allow it finally to enter the World Trade Organisation, thus strengthening its hand in any future trade disputes.

The longer-term view presents perhaps the most interesting and - from China's perspective - exciting prospect. Despite its one billion inhabitants, the rest of the world does not accord to China the status of a superpower. Russia and the Western powers have habitually sidelined China in the UN Security Council. And the Chinese themselves have thrown down their veto only when their immediate interests have been involved. Chinese priorities are shown by their recent vetoing of the plan to increase the numbers of the UN force in Macedonia. In this case, the immediate interest was Macedonia's recognition of the independence of Taiwan. Peking's elite has always taken a long view, and it may well be seeking to transform the Kosovo crisis into its big break.

Irrespective of what China demands, Nato should stand firm on returning the Kosovar refugees to their homes. There must be no concessions on Tibet or on China's human rights record. We cannot go into battle in Europe under the banner of restoring democracy and human rights if we then ignore the same causes in Asia.