Sky's Adam Boulting is on the receiving end of China premier's hard stare
I love it when the British and Chinese leaders get together. You have two entirely different cultures both pretending to be much the same. It's all quite baffling and rather amusing. As when David Cameron came to the Foreign Office with the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao.
Mr Cameron talked about dialogue. Apparently the big thing is going to be people-to-people dialogue, and he didn't mean "number 27 with egg fried rice, please". We are to get together on a personal level to understand our new friends. Especially young people, because they are the future. The Chinese young people will be very polite and talk to our young persons about calligraphy and gymnastics. Our young people will drink mai tai until they are off their skulls.
But that is to come. In the meantime, Mr Wen said he had good news for his dear friends in the press". He was giving a pair of giant pandas to Edinburgh zoo. Not more bloody pandas, I thought. They never mate and they do very little except sit around looking grumpy.
These particular pandas have been announced before. They are like Gordon Brown's spending on the NHS ? the more often you announce each grant, the more generous you look. This was just pandering.
Then came questions. We held our breath. Adam Boulton of Sky News asked when China was going to make progress on human rights.
Mr Cameron flannelled quite well: "Different countries, different history, and different stages of development." Fair enough: 400 years ago, if our leaders didn't like someone, they chopped off their heads.
Mr Wen looked thunderous. He glowered balefully at Mr Boulton. He spoke, at him, very slowly, like a headmaster with a recalcitrant boy, as if saying: "You have let me down, you have let yourself down, and worst of all, you have let the Chinese people down."
We half-expected him to tell Boulton that he had now been condemned to death in absentia. If he ever came to China he would be shot, and the bill for the bullet sent to Rupert Murdoch.
The answer seemed interminable. Prime minister's questions in the Chinese parliament must be very monotonous. They can never get past question one.
When we got the translation it turned out he was indeed very cross. Mr Boulton should spend much more time in China. He should travel by bus and metro (as senior Communist party officials doubtless do all the time). He, Mr Wen, had visited many of China's 2,800 counties. Unlike the wretched Mr Boulton.
The Chinese people had a history going back 5,000 years. They had undergone "untold sufferings", and this had taught them never to address other countries "in a lecturing way".
I took this to mean, "You bastards gave us the opium wars, and now you hector us on human rights! Just shut it, will you?"
Mr Cameron tried an "old Chinese saying". It didn't matter if a cat was black or white, so long as it caught mice.
Mr Wen (who went to Stratford-upon-Avon on Sunday) said that as a boy he had loved William Shakespeare and had read Twelfth Night, King Lear and Othello.
Proof that youth culture really is totally different in the two countries.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/27/wen-jiabao-china-giant-pandas
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