by anotherdrew » Wed Apr 26, 2006 4:07 am
from <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HD26Ad01.html">here</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The US forgets its manners</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>By Todd Crowell</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>HUA HIN, Thailand - Considering how much time and effort was spent on the ceremonial details of Chinese President Hu Jintao's official visit to Washington last week, it is hard to understand how things could have gotten fouled up so badly.<br><br>It should be remembered that the visit started off as a deliberate putdown. The Chinese argued strenuously for a full state visit complete with a black-tie state dinner. They got an official state lunch and a welcome on the White House grounds. Things went downhill from there.<br><br>First the announcer described the national anthem being played in Hu's honor as that of the Republic of China, not the People's Republic of China (PRC).<br><br>In the middle of the ceremony a heckler from the Falungong, a quasi-Buddhist sect banned in China, was allowed to scream abuse at the Chinese president for at least a full minute, some say more than two minutes, before being evicted.<br><br>Toward the end of the ceremony, President George W Bush was photographed grabbing Hu's jacket sleeve to guide him in the right direction. Hu looked down on Bush with obvious distaste as if to say, "Keep your mangy hands off me."<br><br>At a news conference in the Oval Office, a bored-looking Vice President Dick Cheney was photographed slumped in a chair reading a book while the two presidents answered questions.<br><br>The official Chinese media may not have reported the heckler or some of the other boorish incidents. But pictures, videos and descriptions are all over the Internet, stoking anger even among those blogs outside the PRC that normally spend their time bashing the Chinese Communist Party.<br><br>"It is no exaggeration to say that the long-term consequences of Thursday's events for the US and people everywhere yearning for a lowering of international tensions would turn out to be both negative and significant," said the China Confidential blog.<br><br>This was Bush's Belgrade moment. There may be a few Chinese who do not believe that the United States deliberately bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999. There might be a few Chinese who don't believe that the US deliberately sought to humiliate Hu.<br><br>What many can't understand is not only how the heckler was permitted so close to the two presidents but why she was allowed to scream abuse for such a long time. Watching it on Fox News, it seemed to go on forever, and one wondered why somebody didn't remove her.<br><br>As it turns out the heckler, Wang Wenji, had obtained media credentials from the Epoch Times, an online Falungong newspaper. Later the Epoch Times apologized and said, rather disingenuously, "If the Epoch Times had known of her intentions to protest we would have seen that her press credentials were withdrawn."<br><br>In fact, Wang is notorious. She has protested outside Chinese consulates before and on an earlier occasion broke through the security barrier to confront former Chinese president Jiang Zemin while he was visiting Malta in 2001. Could the US Secret Service not have known of her?<br><br>Some US commentators shrugged off the incident or tried to put a good face on it: isn't it nice that the Chinese president gets to hear dissenting voices that he doesn't hear in his own country?<br><br>It's not as if traveling Chinese presidents haven't encountered protesters before. Any time a senior Chinese official visits Europe or North America, he is dogged by proponents of Tibetan independence, Taiwan independence and other causes. They just usually aren't invited to the party.<br><br>One wonders how many of these commentators would have applauded American anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan if she had stood up in the gallery of the US House of Representatives and shouted "Your days are numbered" at Bush during his State of the Union speech for two solid minutes. In fact, she was hustled out of the chamber before she said a word, if indeed she was planning to say something.<br><br>To be fair, the Chinese bear some responsibility for the fiasco. After all, they were the ones obsessed with the ceremonial aspects of the visit, basically demanding a big photo-op that would somehow convey an image of a rising (peacefully, of course) China.<br><br>They might have been wiser to have accepted the Bush administration's initial offer to spend a day, or better a weekend, at his Texas ranch or Camp David. Then the two presidents might have had a real conversation instead of rushing through their talking points.<br><br>But fundamentally it was the host that was responsible. In the space of one hour the US managed to refer to its guest's anthem as that of Taiwan; let a heckler harangue the guest for two full minutes before shutting her up; and yanked the president of a friendly country off the stage. Not bad for a day's work.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=anotherdrew>anotherdrew</A> at: 4/26/06 2:08 am<br></i>
