Last week, the London-based Frontline club, a self-styled bastion of journalistic integrity, held a panel discussion entitled ‘Boycotting China’. According to the accompanying blurb this was to be a debate over whether we in the West should boycott China, be it a refusal to take part in the Beijing Olympics, leaving anything ‘made in China’ on the shelves, or, vainer still - the politicians’ favourite - spurning the Olympics opening ceremony.
That at least was what was advertised. Yet when the chair, journalist and broadcaster Isabel Hilton, received a unanimous ‘no’ from all the participants on the question of a boycott, this allowed a fortuitous change of focus. What now seemed to be at stake was the justification of current Western attitudes to China. Or, as Hilton, echoing a CN Daily headline, put it, ‘does the West love to hate China?’
On the one side then, advocating and, occasionally, hailing the recent explosion of animosity towards China – the Olympic torch protests were ‘heartening’, announced one of them – we had the London director of Human Rights Watch, Tom Porteous, the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall, and the chair herself, Isabel Hilton. And on the other side sat the recipient of their barely repressed wrath: Liu Weimin, a representative of the Chinese Embassy. As Communist Party apparatchiks go, this was one disarmingly charming man. More...
See also: Human Rights: China tells the U.S. to STFU...
And this: China and Tibet: The Empire strikes back...
No comments:
Post a Comment