Who says the president-elect of the United States may not talk to the democratically elected president of Taiwan?
It’s no surprise that America’s left-wing media have responded with disgust to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s phone call with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. The only way Trump can satisfy CNN, MSNBC, and America’s self-styled paper of record is to impersonate Michael Jackson — namely, go to sleep and not wake up.
What was disturbing was China’s reaction to Trump’s Friday-night conversation with Tsai. He did not call the president of the nation that purchased $38.4 billion in U.S. exports in 2015 to plot the economic ruin of mainland China. Nor did Trump ring her to plan military aggression against China via the $1.8 billion in American weapons that the island nation purchased last year, with Obama’s full approval.
What actually happened is that President Tsai called Trump to congratulate him on winning the White House. Despite initial indications that Trump simply picked up the phone as it rang on his desk and then chatted with Tsai — spurring hysterical media reactions — later news accounts suggest a higher level of premeditation. Tsai’s “spontaneous” call seems to have been, as Dennis Miller might have described it, as choreographed as the Lee Harvey Oswald prison transfer. If indeed Trump and Tsai coordinated their talk, this represents Trump’s departure from the status quo and marks a new direction in the U.S.-China-Taiwan love triangle.
China’s government, for its part, flew into a jealous rage; the liberal media, naturally, flipped their wigs.
“It is hard to overstate the bottomless pig-ignorance and recklessness of this step,” roared James Fallows of The Atlantic. “The Trump administration’s relationship with China just started off badly,” Vox declared. It added that things between Trump and Beijing have set off on “the very, very wrong foot.” CNN huffed: “It is perhaps the first major sign of the unpredictability that Trump has vowed to bring to long-held US relations with the rest of the world.”
Of course, if Trump had spurned Tsai’s call, these same left-wing hyenas would have howled that the president-elect is too consumed with sexism and misogyny to treat a prominent female head of state with respect — especially one who has led 23.5 million people since shattering her country’s glass ceiling in January.
Moving from the Beltway to Beijing, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi called the Trump–Tsai conversation “a shenanigan by the Taiwan side” and a “petty gambit.”
China also formally complained to Washington about this.
China’s government, for its part, flew into a jealous rage; the liberal media, naturally, flipped their wigs.
“We have noticed relevant reports and lodged solemn representation with the relevant side in the United States,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang moaned. “I must point out that there is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inseparable part of the Chinese territory. . . . The ‘one China’ principle is the political foundation of China-US relations.”
China Daily, an organ of Beijing’s State Council Information Office, editorialized Sunday that President Tsai’s Phone Call Heard Round the World “achieves nothing substantial, only pride in making what is an illusionary ‘groundbreaking move,’ and temporarily diverting public attention on the island away from her bad performance.”
“To throw a tantrum about China will neither solve domestic issues in the U.S. nor address the real challenges facing Trump’s new administration,” Jia Xiudong fumed yesterday morning in People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. “Besides, a shaky China–U.S. relationship cannot ‘make America great again.’”
How lame.
#related#A strong, self-confident world power would have shrugged its broad shoulders and said: “We hope President-elect Trump and the representative of China’s renegade Taiwan province enjoyed a nice chat. We trust he told her hello for us.”
This would show that the big boys in Beijing could handle this matter like men, and — for their nefarious purposes — put Taiwan in its place, to boot. Instead, they clutched their stuffed animals and melted down like Millennial snowflakes at a liberal-arts college confronting an immeasurably small microaggression.
While Trump emerges as a new kind of leader who will not take orders on which foreign phone calls he may or may not accept, Beijing has diminished itself. Rather than a formidable economic and strategic powerhouse, the People’s Republic of China now resembles a small, thin-skinned, screaming baby.