Taiwan slams global brands for kowtowing to China

Taiwan is calling out global brands that have bowed to Chinese pressure to treat it as just another part of China.
By Daniel Shane

Taiwan's Foreign Ministry on Wednesday berated Air Canada and Gap on Twitter, accusing the airline of buckling under pressure and the clothing retailer of sending the wrong message to the world.
The public scoldings follow recent efforts by the Chinese government to get international companies to adopt its stance on Taiwan on their websites and apps.
China considers self-governed Taiwan to be an integral part of its territory, and comes down hard on any suggestions to the contrary. 

But Taiwan's government, which is currently controlled by a pro-independence party, doesn't recognize Beijing's claims.
It's upset with Air Canada for appearing to describe Taiwan as part of China on its global website.
Air Canada's site now lists destinations in Taiwan under the designation "CN," which is shorthand for China. 

The change appeared to have been made in the past few days, based on archived versions of the carrier's website. 

It previously referred to the destinations as being in "TW," short for Taiwan.
A spokesman for the ministry told Taiwan's main news agency, CNA, on Tuesday that it had asked Canada's biggest airline to rectify the issue.
Air Canada did not respond to requests for comment outside of regular office hours. 

Canadian broadcaster CBC reported that a spokeswoman for the airline said its "policy is to comply with all requirements in all worldwide jurisdictions to which we fly."
The Chinese government recently wrote to more than 30 international airlines, including some US carriers, demanding that they change their websites to remove any information that could suggest that Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macau are not part of China.
The Air Canada spokeswoman didn't say whether the company had received a specific request from China, according to CBC.
The White House has slammed China's demands as "Orwellian nonsense," calling them "part of a growing trend by the Chinese Communist Party to impose its political views on American citizens and private companies."
In January, Delta was publicly scolded by China's aviation administrator for listing Taiwan and Tibet as countries on its Chinese website. 

The company quickly apologized and fixed the issue, drawing criticism from Taiwan.
Other big brands including Marriott and Zara have apologized for similar missteps.
Taiwan's government is unhappy with Gap for its response to an outcry in China over one of its T-shirts. 

Chinese social media users complained that the map of China on the T-shirt left out Taiwan and islands claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea.
Gap on Monday apologized for failing "to reflect the correct map of China" and said it would withdraw the T-shirt from the Chinese market.
"Disappointing to see @Gap engaged in self-criticism," Taiwan's Foreign Ministry tweeted Wednesday. 

"Such acts send the wrong message to the world."
China and Taiwan -- officially the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, respectively -- separated in 1949 following the Communist victory on the mainland after a civil war.
They have been governed separately since, though a shared cultural and linguistic heritage mostly endures -- with Mandarin spoken as the official language in both places.

Rogue nation: Why Europe need not kowtow to China

With a modicum of confidence, EU nations can set the terms of the relationship 
By PHILIP STEPHENS

Economic weakness has seen EU governments allow Beijing to play divide and rule 

It is a commonplace in Chinese commentary that Europe is in irreversible decline.
Hope, you suspect, is welded to expectation.
Democracies, the story goes, are in trouble as the old economic powers are left behind.
China is stealing a technological march.
As the US turns inward, an enfeebled Europe will have to turn eastward.
China’s grand “one belt, one road” project will connect east to west, new to old.
Guess who will be in charge?
Western liberalism, this prognosis has it, has outlived its time.
Cumbersome, inefficient and divisive, it lacks the unity of purpose harnessed by autocratic regimes.
Nor can it any longer meet the demands of the people — witness the trouncing of the old elite by Donald Trump in the US and the nationalist backlash in much of Europe.
The future belongs to strongman leaders untroubled by the competing demands of pluralist societies — Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and, above all, China’s Xi Jinping. Europeans are often too feeble in the face of such jibes.
The autocrats, otherwise intelligent people mutter, have a point.

Xi has attached the might of the state to his great China dream.
The breathless advance of technology is allowing autocrats to tighten their grip on the state.
Look at China’s chilling experiment to capture digitally every detail of its citizens’ lives in a single electronic “rating”, combining everything from credit status to fealty to the party.
Economic weakness at home has seen EU governments scramble for the benefits of doing business with a booming China. 
They have allowed Beijing to play divide and rule. 
London, Paris and Berlin have had their sights on the rich market for exports; smaller economies on the eastern periphery seek a new source of investment.
Human rights now take a back seat. 
Only the other day, 16 leaders from the eastern half of the continent paid homage to Chinese premier Li Keqiang at a summit in Budapest.
All true.
But, as the European Council on Foreign Relations says in an excellent analysis of the balance of power in the EU-China relationship, even the most enthusiastic mercantilists have begun to count the costs of doing business with Beijing. 
Win-win too often refers to a double whammy for China. 
 There is anyway a bigger flaw in these grand predictive sweeps.
The organising assumption is that history travels in straight lines — that Europe’s troubles are inescapable and that China will be forever impervious to the economic cycle and the human desire for freedom.
To the contrary, the EU is on the mend.
Sure, Britain is leaving, but every passing week simply confirms Brexit as a grotesque act of self-harm. 
The rest of the continent has rediscovered economic growth.
Unemployment is falling and investment rising.
Greece no longer threatens to collapse the eurozone.
The migration crisis has subsided.
There are strong hopes in Paris and Berlin for a reinvigoration of the Franco-German relationship.
In short, Europe no longer feels like a continent flat on its back.
 As for European democracy, the populists have been held at bay.
For all the imperfections, successive crises have also shown the peculiar resilience of democratic systems. 
Chucking out the rascals is a safety valve.
Angry though they might be, voters are not clamouring for curbs on individual freedom or yearning for despotic rule.
What is needed now is for Europe to recover confidence in its values and institutions.
The oft-rehearsed argument between those certain that China will soon rule the world and others sure that it will collapse under the collision of rising living standards and political repression is a silly one. What can be sensibly be said is that China has plenty of hurdles yet to jump before it realises Xi’s dream.
Party rule rests on a fragile bargain — economic prosperity in return for the absence of freedom.
One of the striking features of authoritarian regimes is their brittleness. 
They are unassailable until the moment they break.
 Where Beijing is right is that the relationship between China and Europe will be as important as any in shaping geopolitics during coming decades.
The belligerent isolationism of Trump’s foreign policy is unlikely to survive beyond his presidency, but it is a fair assessment that his successors in the White House will draw tighter lines around America’s international commitments.
 So the focus of geopolitical attention will shift from the littoral states of the north Atlantic to what the late Zbigniew Brzezinski once called the “axial supercontinent” of Eurasia.
This is the vast space over which China would like to hold sway during the second half of the 21st century.
The EU has a choice: it can be supplicant, partner or roadblock.
 Europe is rich, technologically advanced and educationally sophisticated.
“One belt, one road” is an offer it can refuse. 
At the very least it can set its own terms for the relationship.
If China wants connectivity it must open up its own economy; if it wants to be an investment partner, it should observe European standards and norms. 
All that is required of EU nations is a modicum of confidence and shared resolve. 
 Europe has taken a battering.
China’s rise has been amplified by western disarray.
Geopolitics, though, is a long game.
Not so long ago the US called itself the indispensable superpower.
Beijing is not immune from such hubris.
China may be at the gates, but Europe should feel no obligation to bow to Beijing.

Per un pugno di renminbi

Liu Xiaobo’s death exposes Western kowtowing to China’s despots
By ROWAN CALLICK
Serving both God and Xi Jinping: Angela Merkel and Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Hamburg.

The global response to the death of Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and his crudely stage-managed cremation and burial at sea will be viewed by chroniclers as a historic watershed.
Democracy and universal human rights are losing their champions, and their power as paradigms.
The world is changing fast. 

At the start of this year — when Xi Jinping received an adulatory welcome from the World Economic Forum elite at Davos with his speech championing “economic globalisation” — it was clear that the centre of international gravity was shifting.
The rush of international leaders to laud the launch of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative followed. 

Those accorded the loudest fanfares in Beijing for that event were Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Russia’s Vladimir Putin — three champions of the new populist authoritarianism.
The G20 in Hamburg followed, at which German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who accorded Xi an especially warm welcome, implicitly contrasted favourably the Chinese “win-win” cliche with the US view of globalisation, which she said was “about winners and losers”.
The G20’s vacuous communique was suffused with the vocabulary and views with which Beijing feels at home.
Soon, China will host the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa for a summit.
Each step in this impressive progress underlines China’s authoritarian culture as the new global norm.
A year ago, the International Court of Arbitration lambasted China’s occupation and arming of the South China Sea. 

But Beijing refused to participate in the process, said it would ignore any finding and would plough on with its strategy. 

Which it has.
The bureaucracies of the Western leaders, including Australia, carefully considered how to respond to Liu’s imminent death.
The result: national leaders said nothing, foreign ministers regretted Liu’s demise and asked if his widow, Liu Xia — charged with no offence — might be allowed to travel outside China.
When Liu was awarded the Nobel in 2010, symposiums were held, speeches made, Western leaders commented widely.
Erna Solberg, the Prime Minister of Norway, which hosts the Nobel Peace Prize and was punished economically by China after Liu’s award, said nothing in the weeks after news of his liver cancer leaked out. 

The former Amnesty International leader there, Petter Eide, said “silence was a sign of support for the Chinese authorities”.
The question that governments, corporations, and especially now also universities, in Western countries ask is not what would Jesus do — which they would think risible — but what would China do.
Journalists and satirists in the West are widely praised for their bravery in poking fun at Donald Trump, the softest target since King George III.
How many have joked about Xi Jinping, the most powerful person in China since Mao Zedong, and in some regards even more powerful? 

In China, even to draw a cartoon or caricature of him is at least banned, and is likely to lead to something worse.
People in the West wonder whether their companies, or economies, will be cut off from China’s wealth if they venture criticisms or make fun.
Even firms like Facebook that have leveraged off their maverick founding myths, end up playing Chinese rules. 

Apple just conceded control over its Chinese data to comply with Beijing’s new cybersecurity regulations as it stores information for its customers in China with a government-owned company.
Trump read out an impressive speech on Western values before the G20. 

But he negated every word when he breathlessly replied — a few hours after Liu had died — to a question about Xi: “He’s a friend of mine. I have great respect for him … a great leader … a very talented man … a very good man … a terrific guy. I like being with him a lot, and he’s a very special person.”
Russia is slipstreaming China’s elevation, sequestering Crimea just as China has done with the South China Sea, as the two form a tight unit in controlling the UN Security Council.
The video of US student Cody Irwin joking in fluent Mandarin about Trump — to laughter and applause — at his graduation speech at Peking University this month has been widely praised.
But when Chinese student Yang Shuping praised America’s “fresh air” and democracy in her commencement speech at Maryland University in May, she faced an avalanche of enmity.
Appropriate lessons are being drawn. 

In career opportunity terms, Irwin has cemented his future, Yang has sealed her fate.
The Sinologist David Shambaugh wrote last month: “Until China develops values that appeal universally, it will lack one of the core features of global leadership.”
However, it is the Western world that is losing contact with core values. 

It is valuing more highly the control and the authority that China is championing.