Sorry for not posting for the last two weeks. Had a lot of work…and really bad insomnia.
Couldn’t let last Sunday’s China Post editorial slip by without comment, though:
In the course of planning surprise visits by our president to countries that have no formal diplomatic relations with us, it is sometimes understandable that government officials try to keep their cards close to their chest.
Uh-huh. Beijing frequently sends its diplomats to cajole or bully other countries into denying planes carrying Taiwanese officials a place to land. As a result, the Chen administration misled reporters as to President Chen’s stopover point, thereby foiling Beijing’s plans. Rather than congratulate Chen for outmaneuvering the Communists, the China Post saw fit to castigate him for, of all things, dishonesty:
From the very start of the nine-day trip, when the Foreign Ministry announced that the president’s plane would make a refueling stop in Alaska, it was clear that officials were making misleading announcements.
After the plane took off, reporters on board who were not told where they were going relied on hand-held compasses to confirm they were heading west and southwest, toward Southeast Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, rather than east toward the North American continent. Before his return trip, false announcements were again made suggesting places where President Chen’s aircraft would stop over, only to have the president make jaunts to Libya and Indonesia.
[…]
In his announcement made over the aircraft’s public address system, President Chen addressed demands that Foreign Minister James Huang step down for blatantly lying about every detail of the trip.
[…]
If Foreign Minister Huang was instructed to tell lies by the president and other superiors, we can forgive him for that. But we should not forgive President Chen for his bizarre and cavalier attitude about telling lies, even if those lies are ostensibly for a good cause.
In the future, President Chen would be wiser to follow the international standard of "refusing to confirm or deny" rather than lying point blank. Rather than do no harm by just keeping mum, President Chen has instead fostered a dangerous culture of lying. (Emphasis added)
Churchill once said that in war, truth is so precious that she should always be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies. That’s probably irrelevant though, because the China Post doesn’t view the Communist Party of China as being hostile, let alone as being an enemy. But when its editorialists accuse others of "fostering a dangerous culture of lying", they should perhaps reflect on the possibility that a few of their own fabrications might contribute to that culture as well:
[One of the reasons that the U.S. refused Chen a transit stop on the American mainland is that it] has also been annoyed by Chen’s lukewarm response to Bush’s 2001 offer of selling an unprecedented robust package of advanced arms to Taiwan.
(From Chen’s problems U.S.-made, The China Post, May 9/06)
Staggering. Chen and his party attempted to bring the arms package to a vote over fifty times, but were blocked each and every time by the opposition KMT party. Meanwhile, it was the China Post that cheered, or least rationalized, the KMT’s obstructionism.
And now, given its own record of hostility to the deal, that newspaper has the face to claim that it was Chen’s response that was lukewarm?