How does Uber boss Travis Kalanick hurt the feelings of the Chinese people with the map he used at a conference in Beijing yesterday? Let me count the ways.
1. Although it doesn’t show the area, the map has labels implying that indisputably Chinese land on the border between Nepal and Pakistan could conceivably be Indian.
2. It shows the part of South Tibet cruelly stolen by British imperialists and now named ‘Arunachal Pradesh’ by India in the same colour as India and with a hatched effect, suggesting it is in some way not a full part of the glorious motherland.
3. It calls the Xisha islands, which have been integral and greatly cherished Chinese possessions for millennia, the ‘Paracels’, suggests their ownership is not beyond doubt, and omits the rest of the South China Sea, down to the shores of the Philippines, Borneo and Vietnam, which is all unquestionably Chinese territory.
4. (or probably 6. or 7. by now) Perhaps most staggeringly of all, the map uses the hatched effect for Taiwan, as if the island province is somehow of a different status from the rest of the country. It also leaves the Diaoyu Islands unnamed, as if it were another country’s territory, which of course it is not.
And this guy wonders why Hong Kong’s patriotic Chief Executive CY Leung orders his valiant police to kick Uber’s door in and drag the interns off to the dungeons.
And why is the South China Morning Post putting this disgraceful insult to the nation’s territorial integrity on its front page? Next thing, they’ll be publishing fellow race-traitor Minxin Pei’s musings on the fate of the ‘predatory state’.
At least the Standard can be relied upon to keep things sane…
A ponzi working another ponzi, desperately trying to get the funding before the show ends.
BTW, Minxin Pei’s article sounds almost like the USA under the oligarchy of the last 25 years which perhaps is why next years federal election may shows the voters are for anything but the status quo. However I suspect most senators and representatives will be returned. No one wants to throw out a thief with lots of seniority in the system for an honest human who won’t steal from the other states and is too low on the totem pole to offer any protection either. China faces the same problem, throw out the CCP and replace them with what?
In the latter days of the Marcos regime/ kleptocracy in the Peens it was the right thing to say in polite society circles that “there is no one else” when it came to government. Then Freddy got chased out of town, by way of a US Air Force cargo plane, and suddenly there were plenty of acceptable candidates.
You really think it will be different in China ?
Joe, yes and no. Marcos picked off visible aspirants for his job, but the CCP has laid down a system where dissent is monitored and neutered before it even buds. His removal simply opened the door to countless lesser thieves already doing well under his rule – no ‘acceptable’ candidates there, at least retrospectively. Meanwhile, taking out the upper echelons of the CCP would not change the functioning of the organisation one jot. Unless you believe a grand coalition of Falun Gong, Uighurs, the Dalai Lama, and sundry campaigning lawyers and rights activists could a) flush out the influence of the CCP behemoth, and b) manage what was left.
So, the two are different, but sadly the same.
@Reader – what you have to hope for in China is a Gorbachev or a de Klerk – someone who has risen to the top of the existing system but has the sense to see it isn’t working and to demolish it. Even then, you might be lucky enough to find a Mandela, but you could just as easily end up with a Yeltsin instead.