Steven Spielberg is reportedly teaming up with fellow filmmaker Zhang Yimou (
Parading in front of Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and US President George W. Bush on the South Lawn of the White House, US troops dressed in Continental Army uniforms dating back more than 200 years seemed to project the message that the US could compete with China's heritage -- if not in terms of the length of its written history, then certainly in terms of the depth of its surviving political and philosophical traditions. What could Hu have offered on behalf of China's 80-year communist era in return, other than re-enactments of the masses in a frenzy clutching little red books before tearing each other apart?
As Hu began his speech, a lone Falun Gong protester, pathologist Wang Wenyi (
There could not have been a more fitting incident to demonstrate the basic difference between these two powers. Had Wang the gall to launch her protest on Chinese territory, her fate would have been grim: protracted physical abuse, lengthy incarceration if not execution and -- if Falun Gong propaganda is to be believed -- possibly placed high on a list of compulsory organ donors for good measure. In the US, on the other hand, she will receive much more reasonable punishment if found guilty of "disorderly conduct," and possibly "willingly intimidating or disrupting a foreign official."
The incident is all the more meaningful because of the lack of progress in talks on the trade deficit, revaluation of the yuan, North Korea, Iran and Taiwan. Going into the meeting with Bush, Hu had been toasted by some of the most powerful businesspeople in the world, people who could be relied on not to raise irritating issues such as human rights and aggression toward Taiwan -- because there is no money to be made from such things. But the Falun Gong protest brought Hu back to earth with a thud, and he subsequently found Bush to be considerably less effusive, if more apologetic, toward him than other heads of state.
Hu's trip will be remembered more for symbolism than breakthroughs in bilateral relations, and it is instructive that the two powers could not even agree on the status of the visit -- "official" or "state" -- and that Hu was not thrown a reception down home on Bush's Texas range.
Spielberg and Zhang, as master filmmakers, are as aware as anyone of the power of symbolism in the mass media. There is every chance their mighty talents will be put to use in 2008 in a scenario with more than an echo of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It would be savagely ironic if the directors of Schindler's List, Munich, The Story of Qiu Ju and To Live were to become unwitting Leni Riefenstahls of the 21st century, though Spielberg may yet have the wisdom to rethink his decision.
But, as events at the White House showed, until such time that professionals such as these contribute to the Chinese Communist Party's survival and actively craft a more user-friendly Chinese nationalism, Hu and his underlings will continue to struggle to understand how to market their image to anyone for whom there is more to life than cultural relativism and conscience-free cash.
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
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