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SMH!: China forgets manners as Rice visit touches nerves
"How come the United States selects a female chimpanzee as Secretary of State?"  The 5000 years of civilisation on which the Chinese pride themselves were not so evident this week in the comments on Condoleezza Rice's visit to Beijing posted on the internet site "New Tide Net". As monitored by the media analyst Liu Xiaobo, the overall tone of the 800 postings was hostile and about 10 per cent were racist, sexist or both, reflecting what Mr Liu calls a pervasive phobia here about dark-skinned races. Similar undercurrents well up in neighbouring South Korea and Japan, which Dr Rice also visited on her introductory Asian tour as Washington's foreign minister.Although Dr Rice's public comments here about the touchy subjects of Taiwan, North Korea and China's domestic freedoms were restrained, the visit capped a frustrating episode for the leadership. The "Anti-Secession Law" passed by the rubber-stamp Chinese parliament this month, designed to quelch moves towards formal independence in Taiwan, has boomeranged on Beijing. On Saturday afternoon in Taipei, President Chen Shui-bian will orchestrate a massive protest against the law and its threat of "non-peaceful means" should Taiwan's politicians step beyond the law's ill-defined markers. International opinion, especially in the democratic countries where Beijing needs to improve support for its Taiwan policies, has been generally critical of the law, with Dr Rice calling it "unhelpful". Most embarrassing of all, the anti-secession law has slowed and possibly derailed the push by Germany and France to lift the European Union's arms embargo on China, imposed after the 1989 massacre around Tiananmen Square in Beijing... This week, China's official media were reduced to reporting solemnly that support for the anti-secession law had come from such statesmen as Sonatane Tu'akinamolahi Taumoepeau-Tupou, Foreign Minister of Tonga, and Abu Bakr Abdullah al-Kurbi, Foreign Minister of Yemen. Hence, perhaps, the dark thoughts Beijing has allowed to surface on the internet. The Chinese would have done well to have publicised Dr. Rice's Birmingham background before her arrival. I'm sure someone in the CIA will make sure this doesn't play well in Africa. Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-03-25 |
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