Zhu Ying

Early Life and Journalism Career

Zhu Ying was born on 2 November 1971 in Beijing. She spent her childhood with her parents in Yuanping County, Shanxi, attending the primary and middle schools attached to Shanxi Agricultural University before entering Taigu County No. 1 High School, a Shanxi key school, in September 1986. In September 1989 she enrolled at the Tianjin Institute of Light Industry (now Tianjin University of Science and Technology), studying packaging design within its Department of Industrial Art Engineering, and graduated in July 1992. She initially worked as an art editor at a Beijing printing enterprise before transferring, in January 1994, to the advertising department of Guangming Daily as an art editor, where her work won a Beijing Advertising Association "Kunlun Cup" award. On 28 September 1996 she married fellow Guangming Daily journalist Xu Xinghu. On 22 July 1998, the couple were posted together to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where she served as a correspondent for Guangming Daily's Belgrade bureau — though it should be noted that her career prior to this posting was entirely in art editing rather than news reporting, and accounts differ on her exact day-to-day responsibilities in Belgrade; the "correspondent" designation is the one used in official and mainstream reporting.

The Belgrade Embassy Bombing

Late on the night of 7 May 1999 (around 23:45 Belgrade time, roughly 05:45 Beijing time on 8 May), a US Air Force B-2 stealth bomber flying from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, dropped five JDAM satellite-guided bombs on the Chinese Embassy in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, severely damaging the building. Xinhua correspondent Shao Yunhuan and Guangming Daily correspondents Xu Xinghu and Zhu Ying were killed instantly, and more than twenty others were injured — a subsequent US-China compensation agreement recorded the figure as 27. Zhu Ying and Xu Xinghu are believed to have been in the embassy's residential quarters when the strike occurred. US officials subsequently explained the bombing as the result of intelligence agencies using an outdated map that misidentified the embassy as the Yugoslav arms procurement agency's headquarters, an 'error' CIA Director George Tenet publicly acknowledged; a later New York Times investigation likewise found no evidence the strike was deliberate. On the other hand, a four-month joint investigation published on 17 October 1999 by Britain's Observer and Denmark's Politiken, citing an anonymous senior NATO officer, concluded the embassy had been deliberately targeted because it was allegedly being used to relay Yugoslav military communications and monitor NATO stealth-aircraft movements — a claim US and UK officials denied. Both explanations remain in circulation, and which is correct has never been conclusively established.

Chinese Reaction, Compensation, and Memorialisation

In the aftermath, large protests took place outside US diplomatic missions in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Shanghai, and other cities, damaging some American diplomatic property; the Chinese government lodged a formal protest with the United States the same day. On 30 July 1999, the two countries reached an agreement on humanitarian compensation, under which the US paid $4.5 million to the victims' families and the injured (disbursed in late August), stating the payment did not constitute an admission of legal liability; on 16 December 1999, a separate agreement addressed property damage, with the US paying China $28 million for damage to the embassy building and China paying the US $2.87 million for damage to American diplomatic facilities sustained during the protests. In May 1999, the CCP Central Propaganda Department and the All-China Journalists Association posthumously conferred the honorary title 'The People's Good Journalist' on Shao Yunhuan, Xu Xinghu, and Zhu Ying; Xu Xinghu separately received Yugoslavia's Order of the Star of Yugoslavia that December. The couple's ashes were returned to China and interred at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing; in accordance with the family's wishes, a portion was also moved on 19 May 1999 to Xu Xinghu's ancestral home in Danyang, Jiangsu, where, following an administrative reorganisation in 2001, his home village was renamed 'Xinghu Village' and a memorial site was established. Zhu Ying and Xu Xinghu had no children; according to some accounts, the couple had planned to start a family after completing their overseas posting.