It’s time for the U.S. to SHUT UP

20 Aug 2006 in China, radio show by Alex | 2 comments

I recently listened to “this interview”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/the_interview.shtml on the BBC with Chinese ambassador Sha Xu Kang. If you were wondering what the Chinese diplomatic equivalent of the “Terry Gross/Gene Simmons”:http://erim.net/archives/gene-simmons-and-terry-gross-interview interview was, this is it. The first 19 minutes go by just fine, until the interviewer starts asking about Taiwan and it starts to ramp up…

  1. Alex Stewart’s avatar

    Alex Stewart on 21 Aug 2006 at 3:55 pm

    It’s a fascinating interaction: the former superpower (Britain) asks the future superpower (China) about what the current superpower says of its “ambition.” Although I don’t know why Carrie Gracie chose to quote Donald Rumsfeld’s assessments of the Chinese military- he doesn’t exactly scream credibility…

    It’s also reminiscent of “yellow peril” paranoia when she talks about China using soft power to control nations “culturally, almost subliminally.” China needs resources just like everyone else and its hard not to see the U.S. government’s hypocrisy.

    Even though he greatly simplified Chinese history, I enjoyed Su’s historical references. Just because they never had a Western-style colony doesn’t mean their foreign relations were peaceful. China even had its own Vietnam quagmire (in Vietnam) during the early Ming Dynasty. But Su would rather focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which explains his passion about “territorial integrity.”

    In the PRC, I often heard people assert that all Chinese people believe the same thing, but it still sounds ludicrous when Su says,

    “People have their freedom of choice and whatever political system they want it’s their business. Anyway for the Chinese, we have a choosing. It’s the socialist system.”

  2. Rex’s avatar

    Rex on 21 Aug 2006 at 10:04 pm

    Honestly I think that Grace was pitching him slow balls that he could have knocked out of the park — what better opportunity to demonstrate the reasonableness of China’s policy then to compare it to the ever-unpopular Rumsfeld? That said I think that Su is very oriented to the last two centuries of China’s history, which didn’t exactly involve China forcing the British to continue selling opium in London, if you know what I mean. If Grace wanted to pursue questions of China’s human rights record and potential imperialist intentions she’d have done better to bring up Tibet or 1989.