Days after taking 50 percent of the vehicles off the streets of Beijing to clear up the skies ahead of the Olympic Games a few weeks hence, Chinese authorities announced over the weekend that more “emergency” measures might be in order. A day later, equestrian teams practicing in Hong Kong did so in a thick layer of smog, while a dense white haze drastically cut visibility in Beijing. The capital city’s response was to announce it would temporarily cut down vehicles by 90 percent.
China’s air quality woes provide a picture-perfect metaphor for everything that is wrong with China as well as the International Olympic Committee’s decision to award it the Games. Everything it does is about appearances: providing a semblance of stability, effecting a sham liberalization of the media and making promises of safe, clean air.
The reality behind this approach, however, is that Beijing’s efforts are temporary, strongly putting into doubt the contention that the Beijing Olympics will have long-term positive repercussions on the government’s behavior. Those who argue this, however, fail to understand that China is a big power that continues to act like an adolescent, promising this and that to obtain what it wants, only to break its promises to the international community — or its people — once it has achieved its objectives.
News yesterday that Beijing was breaking a commitment it had made at the WTO to lower tariffs on rice, cotton and sugar is another reminder of how unreliable China is as a stakeholder. China was turning into “a major problem” and was “going back on a lot of its promises,” a diplomat said at the WTO. China gained entry into the world body by making a series of promises. Now that China is a member, it’s starting to break those promises, and good luck to any country that would seek to expel it.
All of this should alarm those who have been hoping for a paradigm shift after the Games. From Chinese activists to Tibetan nationalists, from the victims of Chinese-backed genocide in Darfur to people worldwide consuming potentially deadly Chinese products, the lesson to be learned is that a lot of what China does is temporary, a series of stopgap measures to minimize its humiliation.
It will do the bare minimum to ensure that the Games are successful, but once the Olympians have departed and the media’s glare has shifted elsewhere, Beijing will revert to its old self, just as the millions of cars thronging Beijing’s streets will come out of hiding and once again turn its skies into a choking pall.
This should also serve as a reminder to Taiwanese diplomats and back-channel negotiators seeking to achieve cross-strait rapprochement that Beijing’s promises are not worth the paper they’re written on and that it is just as likely to go back on its word after it has obtained what it wants from Taiwan.
In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if, once the Olympics began — with KMT Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) and Taiwanese Cabinet officials in attendance — Chinese media were to break their pledge to refer to Taiwanese teams as Zhonghua Taibei (Chinese Taipei) and revert to Zhongguo Taibei (Taipei, China).
Given its precarious position, Taiwan can hardly afford to be fooled. It should heed the already ample number of signals, lest the next time it looks to the skies it finds the smog closing in.
With its passing of Hong Kong’s new National Security Law, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continues to tighten its noose on Hong Kong. Gone is the broken 1997 promise that Hong Kong would have free, democratic elections by 2017. Gone also is any semblance that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plays the long game. All the CCP had to do was hold the fort until 2047, when the “one country, two systems” framework would end and Hong Kong would rejoin the “motherland.” It would be a “demonstration-free” event. Instead, with the seemingly benevolent velvet glove off, the CCP has revealed its true iron
At the end of last month, Paraguayan Ambassador to Taiwan Marcial Bobadilla Guillen told a group of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators that his president had decided to maintain diplomatic ties with Taiwan, despite pressure from the Chinese government and local businesses who would like to see a switch to Beijing. This followed the Paraguayan Senate earlier this year voting against a proposal to establish ties with China in exchange for medical supplies. This constituted a double rebuke of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) diplomatic agenda in a six-month span from Taiwan’s only diplomatic ally in South America. Last year, Tuvalu rejected an
US President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday last week announced it would impose sanctions on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a vast paramilitary organization that is directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has been linked to human rights violations against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The sanctions follow US travel bans against other Xinjiang officials and the passage of the US Hong Kong Autonomy Act, which authorizes targeted sanctions against mainland Chinese and Hong Kong officials, in response to Beijing’s imposition of national security legislation on the territory. The sanctions against the corps would be implemented
US President Donald Trump on Thursday issued executive orders barring Americans from conducting business with WeChat owner Tencent Holdings and ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of popular video-sharing app TikTok. The orders are to take effect 45 days after they were signed, which is Sept. 20. The orders accuse WeChat of helping the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) review and remove content that it considers to be politically sensitive, and of using fabricated news to benefit itself. The White House has accused TikTok of collecting users’ information, location data and browsing histories, which could be used by the Chinese government, and pose
RSS