HUA HIN, Thailand - Considering how much
time and effort was spent on the ceremonial
details of Chinese President Hu Jintao's official
visit to Washington last week, it is hard to
understand how things could have gotten fouled up
so badly.
It should be remembered that the
visit started off as a deliberate putdown. The
Chinese argued strenuously for a full state visit
complete with a black-tie state dinner. They got
an official state lunch and a welcome on the White
House grounds. Things went downhill from there.
First the announcer described the national
anthem being played in
Hu's
honor as that of the Republic of China, not the
People's Republic of China (PRC).
In the
middle of the ceremony a heckler from the
Falungong, a quasi-Buddhist sect banned in China,
was allowed to scream abuse at the Chinese
president for at least a full minute, some say
more than two minutes, before being evicted.
Toward the end of the ceremony, President
George W Bush was photographed grabbing Hu's
jacket sleeve to guide him in the right direction.
Hu looked down on Bush with obvious distaste as if
to say, "Keep your mangy hands off me."
At
a news conference in the Oval Office, a
bored-looking Vice President Dick Cheney was
photographed slumped in a chair reading a book
while the two presidents answered questions.
The official Chinese media may not have
reported the heckler or some of the other boorish
incidents. But pictures, videos and descriptions
are all over the Internet, stoking anger even
among those blogs outside the PRC that normally
spend their time bashing the Chinese Communist
Party.
"It is no exaggeration to say that
the long-term consequences of Thursday's events
for the US and people everywhere yearning for a
lowering of international tensions would turn out
to be both negative and significant," said the
China Confidential blog.
This was Bush's
Belgrade moment. There may be a few Chinese who do
not believe that the United States deliberately
bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May
1999. There might be a few Chinese who don't
believe that the US deliberately sought to
humiliate Hu.
What many can't understand
is not only how the heckler was permitted so close
to the two presidents but why she was allowed to
scream abuse for such a long time. Watching it on
Fox News, it seemed to go on forever, and one
wondered why somebody didn't remove her.
As it turns out the heckler, Wang Wenji,
had obtained media credentials from the Epoch
Times, an online Falungong newspaper. Later the
Epoch Times apologized and said, rather
disingenuously, "If the Epoch Times had known of
her intentions to protest we would have seen that
her press credentials were withdrawn."
In
fact, Wang is notorious. She has protested outside
Chinese consulates before and on an earlier
occasion broke through the security barrier to
confront former Chinese president Jiang Zemin
while he was visiting Malta in 2001. Could the US
Secret Service not have known of her?
Some
US commentators shrugged off the incident or tried
to put a good face on it: isn't it nice that the
Chinese president gets to hear dissenting voices
that he doesn't hear in his own country?
It's not as if traveling Chinese
presidents haven't encountered protesters before.
Any time a senior Chinese official visits Europe
or North America, he is dogged by proponents of
Tibetan independence, Taiwan independence and
other causes. They just usually aren't invited to
the party.
One wonders how many of these
commentators would have applauded American
anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan if she had stood
up in the gallery of the US House of
Representatives and shouted "Your days are
numbered" at Bush during his State of the Union
speech for two solid minutes. In fact, she was
hustled out of the chamber before she said a word,
if indeed she was planning to say something.
To be fair, the Chinese bear some
responsibility for the fiasco. After all, they
were the ones obsessed with the ceremonial aspects
of the visit, basically demanding a big photo-op
that would somehow convey an image of a rising
(peacefully, of course) China.
They might
have been wiser to have accepted the Bush
administration's initial offer to spend a day, or
better a weekend, at his Texas ranch or Camp
David. Then the two presidents might have had a
real conversation instead of rushing through their
talking points.
But fundamentally it was
the host that was responsible. In the space of one
hour the US managed to refer to its guest's anthem
as that of Taiwan; let a heckler harangue the
guest for two full minutes before shutting her up;
and yanked the president of a friendly country off
the stage. Not bad for a day's work.
Todd Crowell is a correspondent
for Asia Times Online based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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