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China-Japan-Koreas
Notes on China and Taiwan
2007-02-09
Jay Nordlinger, National Review

¡ñ Wonder if you saw a story out of Taipei: ¡°President Chen Shui-bian said Thursday the name ¡®Taiwan¡¯ would soon replace ¡®China¡¯ on the island¡¯s stamps, a move likely to anger Beijing.¡±

Yeah, what doesn¡¯t anger Beijing? Taiwan¡¯s very existence angers Beijing, as does the existence of anything not controlled by those brutes. One day, Beijing will swallow Taiwan, that plucky little democracy. And, until it does, Taiwan might as well live a little. And living includes determining your own frickin¡¯ stamps.

By the way, I suspect that the world will gasp for, oh, about two and a half days after Beijing swallows Taiwan (violently, in all probability). And how long will the world gasp if Iran obliterates Israel with nuclear weapons? Three days? Four?

Perhaps a ghoulish contest could be held.

¡ñ And did you read this glorious, glorious story, out of Grenada ¡ª tiny Grenada (liberated by Reagan et al. in 1983)?

A diplomatic gaffe marred Saturday¡¯s inauguration of a China-financed stadium on this Caribbean island when a band performed the national anthem of Chinese rival Taiwan.

Oh, marvelous, just marvelous ¡ª play it again, Grenada.

¡ñ This, I¡¯m afraid, is a less funny story. The PRC prevented 20 Chinese writers from attending an International PEN conference in Hong Kong ¡ª Hong Kong, mind you, which is under the control of Beijing.

Some were warned not to go, while others who had permits to travel to Hong Kong . . . had their documents seized at the border.

The travel restrictions came after China¡¯s recent ban of eight books, most of them works of history, including one about the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003. . . .

The crackdown came just weeks after the government relaxed decades-old restrictions on foreign media, giving them greater freedom to report the 2008 Beijing Olympics ¡ª a move that it hoped would burnish its international image.

Oh, yeah.

But Chinese writers said the tolerance granted foreigners does not extend to those who write for a Chinese audience.

¡°It¡¯s all for show,¡± said Yu Jie, a writer who has been blacklisted and unable to publish under his own name for more than two years. ¡°They¡¯re actually tightening their grip on China¡¯s writers.¡±

¡°It¡¯s all for show.¡± You¡¯re exactly right, Mr. Yu.
Posted by:Mike

#2  Eric, my browser, Mozilla Firefox, is set to Western (ISO-8859-1). The text is still a little gunked up but readable.
Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305   2007-02-09 15:40  

#1  Fred,

What character encoding does this story take? Neither ISO-Latin-1 nor UTF-8 work.
Posted by: Eric Jablow   2007-02-09 10:27  

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