Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) was not kidding when he recently warned that improving cultural ties with China would face more challenges. He was speaking about the brouhaha over Chinese delegation head Jiang Ping’s (江平) tyrannical outburst at the Tokyo International Film Festival, where he insisted that Taiwan take part under a Beijing-blessed name, such as “Chinese Taipei” or “Taiwan, China.”
The nerve, the nerve.
It’s one thing for Beijing to insist on playing by its own rules inside China, but to start pushing around sovereign countries like Japan and Taiwan is unbelievable. And yet it happened, and it will happen again. Wu tried to downplay the whole fiasco by trying to paint Jiang as a loose cannon, who did not have the blessings of his handlers in the Chinese Communist Party.
“Occasionally, there will be one or two Jiang Pings,” Wu said in the legislature. “It is unavoidable.”
What he meant, in fact, was that there will always be a dozen Jiangs and they will continue to act in full coordination with their minders in Beijing whenever they get the chance. This is the Beijing playbook.
As seen in recent events this year, China doesn’t only try to push Japan around. It also tried to push the Philippines around in the aftermath of the tragic hostage crisis in Manila when a retired police officer shot up a bus full of Hong Kong tourists. When the policeman was buried in his home province, local authorities — in consultation with the dead man’s family — draped a Philippine flag over the coffin during the funeral.
China’s ambassador in Manila had the effrontery to demand that the Philippine flag be taken off the casket. When will China learn that it cannot dictate how other countries bury their dead, whether they be heroes or tragic saps?
What’s next? Beijing will tell US President Barack Obama how to tie his tie and what color shoes he can wear?
China is getting too big for its own britches and it’s high time the entire world call Beijing on the carpet and tell it to start behaving like a civilized country — if indeed it is a civilized country, and many old China hands have their doubts. Jiang’s obnoxious and prissy outburst in Tokyo was not an isolated incident.
Jiang should be listed as persona non grata in Taiwan and his unbecoming antics in Tokyo should be remembered by all of China’s neighbors in Asia anxiously watching Beijing’s so-called “peaceful rise” region-wide. China is about as peaceful as a slumbering volcano ready to vent. It bears careful watching, and not only by its neighbors. The West needs to wake up to Beijing’s shenanigans, too.
Jiang is a caricature of China’s brainwashed nationalists. He is not alone in his animosity toward Taiwan; there is a whole army of mind-controlled bureaucrats behind him, and he represents what China wants to become, if it is not checked by Tokyo, Washington, Canberra and London.
China is a master of international public relations and after basking in the 2008 Summer Olympics it thinks it can do whatever it wants, not only inside Beijing, but also in Tokyo and Manila and Washington. It won’t be long before another Jiang lurches forward at a press conference in Washington and tries to push another Falun Gong follower to the ground.
It’s going to get ugly.
Dan Bloom is an American writer based in Taiwan.
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