China’s ambassador to France on Monday paid tribute to former French president Charles de Gaulle’s “visionary” role in helping the communist government secure global recognition.
In a ceremony to mark the 49th anniversary of France becoming the first Western power to establish full diplomatic relations with Beijing, the ambassador laid a wreath at the former president’s tomb in the Champagne region.
“Time has proved right the common vision of General De Gaulle and Chairman Mao [Zedong (毛澤東)],” ambassador, Kong Quan (孔泉) said of the man who was the symbol of France’s wartime resistance to Nazi Germany and served as president between 1959 and 1969. “Since this recognition, the strategic partnership between France and China has been characterized by friendship. This recognition allowed our two countries to assert their independence and their respective places in the world.”
France announced its recognition of Mao’s communists on Jan. 27, 1964, in a brief communique that generated diplomatic shock waves at a time when the US still insisted the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime in Taiwan should be considered the legitimate government of all China.
Britain had recognized the communist regime in 1950, but did not exchange ambassadors with Beijing until 1972.
At the time China was recognized, De Gaulle was seeking to forge a new “middle” role for France on an international stage dominated by the Cold War confrontation between the US and its allies and the communist world. Two years later, he was to withdraw the country from NATO’s military command structures.
“There is something abnormal in the fact that we don’t have relations with the most populous country in the world because the Americans don’t like the regime,” De Gaulle confided at the time to then-French Information minister Alain Peyrefitte.
Officials at the Charles de Gaulle foundation are hopeful incoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) will visit Paris for next year’s 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations.
The French Foreign Ministry said no arrangement to that effect had been made.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s officially declared wealth is fairly modest: some savings and a jointly owned villa in Budapest. However, voters in what Transparency International deems the EU’s most corrupt country believe otherwise — and they might make Orban pay in a general election this Sunday that could spell an end to his 16-year rule. The wealth amassed by Orban’s inner circle is fueling the increasingly palpable frustration of a population grappling with sluggish growth, high inflation and worsening public services. “The government’s communication machine worked well as long as our economic situation remained relatively good,” said Zoltan Ranschburg, a political analyst
RSS