Actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) on March 13 posted an Instagram caption after the opening of Tiffany’s Taipei flagship store two days earlier that read: “Thank you Tiffany for inviting us to Taipei China.”
We know that Yeoh knows Taipei is in Taiwan, not China, because the caption was posted following comments she made — in English — in which she said: “Thank you to Tiffany for bringing me to Taipei, because I do love this country very much.”
Her remarks and the subsequent Instagram caption were reported in Taiwan, in Chinese and English-
language media such as Radio Free Asia, and overseas, including her home country, Malaysia, and online social media platforms such as Reddit.
In the Taipei Times, the issue has sparked a debate between Institute for National Defense and Security Research visiting fellow Sasha Chhabra and Marcel Oppliger, a Chilean journalist and writer living in Taipei.
Writing on Saturday last week (“Yeoh is welcome any time,” page 8), Oppliger disagreed with Chhabra’s suggestion that Taiwan should impose a lifetime entry ban on Yeoh and prohibit government funding for her films (“Michelle Yeoh should no longer be welcome,” March 26, page 8). Oppliger said this reaction — which Chhabra himself acknowledged was “severe” — was inappropriate for a country that espouses democracy and personal freedoms, adding that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would regard the headline “Michelle Yeoh banned from Taiwan” as something of a propaganda coup.
On Tuesday, Chhabra penned a response, “Borders are a part of a country’s sovereignty,” saying that Yeoh had acted “in a premeditated way to join China’s cognitive warfare and propaganda against Taiwan.” He wrote that the CCP would not like the headline, as it would suggest that Beijing did not have control over the borders of one if its “provinces.”
The two writers have different interpretations of Yeoh’s motivations. Chhabra sees her Instagram caption as a calculated, cynical collusion with the CCP’s propaganda machine; Oppliger is willing to believe that it was simply a cold calculation of reputational and financial gain and loss.
However, both men seem to agree that an opportunity exists to use the situation, reported internationally in Chinese and English media, to emphasize Taiwan’s message, that it is a sovereign country deserving of respect, even if their way of framing that opportunity, and how to go about capitalizing on it, differs radically.
Here is another interpretation: During her live comments, in an unguarded moment, Yeoh said what she knew instinctively to be true; her Instagram caption reflected what her, or Tiffany’s, public relations team wanted the world to see, under implicit or explicit pressure from Beijing.
Comments on Yeoh’s Instagram post reflect the debate, for and against, Taiwan’s sovereignty, either expressing disappointment in Yeoh or praising her choice of words. The point is the implications were not lost on either side; there was no normalization of the term “country,” only an awareness and highlighting of why it is so contentious in this context.
Punishing Yeoh might be misunderstanding the nature of the opportunity. It might be more instructive to ask why the CCP is so sensitive about how people speak of Taiwan in the international media, which it cannot control, as it does with its own media.
US academic and historian Stephen Kotkin, who has written about the collapse of the Soviet Union, has said that authoritarian systems are strong yet brittle. The military drills around Taiwan on Tuesday were an expression of China’s strength; its sensitivity to news of any entertainer calling Taiwan a country is an expression of weakness and the CCP leadership’s awareness of the brittle nature of its hold on power. The brittle nature of its narrative on Taiwan derives from its inability to withstand scrutiny.
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