But she then asked for a private conversation with Li, who later rose to become foreign minister and whom she described as a “friend”.

“So I asked everybody to leave and I said to him, ‘Look, it really was a mistake,’ and I’m really sorry and I don’t want to get him into trouble even now,” Albright said in an interview for Georgetown University’s US-China Dialogue podcast in 2020.

“But he said, ‘I think I understand that, but I have to do what I have to do.’ And so it was kind of, he had to make clear that he was mad at us about everything.”

She said that Chinese leaders and top diplomats became fixated on blaming Washington for the bombing “every time that we had a conversation”, but it did not escalate further to derail the WTO negotiations or the already bumpy bilateral relationship.

In recent years, Albright has often been criticised for her pro-engagement approach to China and particularly her efforts to delink the country’s human rights record and trade relations.

“Albright helped steer America’s post-Cold War diplomacy and played a big role in managing a critical and eventful period of US-China relations, which despite turbulent moments, have paved the way for China’s further integration into the global economy,” said Pang Zhongying, a professor of international relations at the Ocean University of China in Qingdao.

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Albright was born in Prague in 1937, but her family fled to London two years later when the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia. They left the country for good in 1948, the year the Communists seized power in her homeland.

The UN, where Albright served as US ambassador from 1993 to 1997, held a moment of silence for her late Wednesday afternoon, with its Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calling her “a trailblazer, a role model, and a champion of multilateral action and international cooperation”.

She advocated a tough US foreign policy and championed the expansion of Nato and “humanitarian intervention” in places like Haiti and the Balkans and was a “tireless champion of democracy and human rights”, according to her family’s statement announcing her death.

Albright was hailed as a hero for persuading former President Bill Clinton to fight a Nato-led war against the Serbs over Kosovo – the campaign which led to the embassy bombing.

At one point she challenged Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by asking: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

But she has often been criticised over Washington’s failure to prevent the genocide in Rwanda and the starvation of Iraqi children as a result of US sanctions.

“It is still early to say exactly what her foreign policy legacy is, given the partisan divide in the US and the uncertainties about American diplomacy,” Pang said.

“But on China, I think Beijing should thank her and the Clinton administration for their efforts to separate politics from economic cooperation, a momentous step for China’s global ascendance. And in the aftermath of the bombing of our embassy, she helped prevent the crisis from spiralling into a disaster.”

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Albright also defended Clinton’s switch to becoming a fervent supporter of engagement with Beijing after criticising George HW Bush for kowtowing to the “butchers of Beijing” after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

She recalled that Chinese diplomats in the early 1990s were reluctant to get involved in discussions of global affairs “as though they [don’t] have a larger world view at that time” and were interested only in issues pertaining to outside interference with their internal affairs.

The Clinton administration, she said in the 2020 interview, saw China as “being part of a system of an international system, not a kind of exotic group of people that never had any say in things, in some ways kind of just pushing them to get more involved”.

Albright was a student of and then worked briefly for Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbignew Brzezinski, who helped normalise US-China ties in 1979. According to Pang, she belonged to an old generation of Americans who tended to see China via a lens of cooperation rather than a zero-sum game.

She made five visits to Beijing during her tenure as the top American diplomat, the first in February 1997, a month after taking up the role. The visit came just days after the passing of Deng Xiaoping, whom she described as an “historic figure” who helped “opened China up” but was also responsible for the Tiananmen crackdown.

“Considering her childhood as a refugee from war-torn Eastern Europe, she’s been obsessed with human rights issues, but she nonetheless gave her full support for Clinton’s efforts to integrate China into globalisation.

Unfortunately, the opposite is happening in US-China relations when both sides try to bind ideology and politics with economics and other issues,” Pang said.

He also said Albright must have felt strongly about the unfolding crisis in Europe and the emerging alignment between China and Russia.

“We are witnessing major changes to the crumbling world order and that’s why insightful politicians like Albright will be sorely missed in the wake of the Ukraine crisis,” Pang said.

In an article for The New York Times published last month just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Albright warned it would be “a historic mistake” that would leave Moscow “even more dependent on China”.