China forgets manners as Rice visit touches nerves
China forgets manners as Rice visit touches nerves
By Hamish McDonald, Herald Correspondent in Beijing
March 26, 2005
"How come the United States selects a female chimpanzee as Secretary of State?"
"This black woman thinks rather a lot of herself."
"She's so ugly she's losing face. Even a dog would be put off its dinner while she's being fed."
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.
The law was cited by the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, as a new obstacle. Britain had been supporting the lifting of the ban, but this week signalled that it wanted to postpone a decision because of US concerns.
Several other European states are also opposed - including Italy, Sweden and Belgium.
The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has made it clear his government would back a lifting of the embargo only if a strong code regulating arms sales to China had already been adopted. President Jacques Chirac of France, who has been arguing that lifting the embargo was a face-saver for Beijing rather than clearance for large-scale military exports, may be kept to his word.
The backlash will be all the more galling for Chinese leaders because they genuinely seem to feel that the anti-secession law is a moderate document rather than a sabre-rattling threat, as it has been widely interpreted.
The idea of such a law was first mentioned in August, in the wake of Mr Chen's re-election as president last March and with the prospect of his ruling party gaining a majority in the Taiwan legislature in December elections, helping its prospects of passing constitutional changes that the Chinese fear would amount to de jure independence.
Mr Chen's Democratic Progressive Party actually flopped in the December election. But by then so many drums had been beaten in Beijing about the anti-secession law it may have been seen as impossible to drop it without great loss of face.
Some analysts see the final version as actually intended to give the Chinese President and Communist Party leader, Hu Jintao, a lot more flexibility in his dealings with Taiwan than under the policy straitjacket left by his predecessor, Jiang Zemin.
The law is noticeable for not explicitly pushing a "one country-two systems" settlement, and its main article about talks and negotiations does not set the condition that Taiwan must accept it is part of "one China" - although the one-China principle is mentioned elsewhere.
The authorisation of "non-peaceful means" as a "last resort" is also seen as tipping graduated sanctions rather than an abrupt use of force.
However, what works in the byzantine political milieu of the Great Hall of the People and the nearby Zhongnanhai leadership compound does not always sell itself in the outside world.
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.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Chi...?oneclick=true
