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On Balance | As the US ramps up accusations, China stops appealing to ‘the feelings’ of its people and gets to work on alliances
- US attacks on Beijing are reaching a crescendo, so China is moving from its standard emotional appeals and towards reason-based appeals to a global audience
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In December 2017, an American vandalised a 2,000-year-old Chinese terracotta warrior on loan to a Philadelphia museum. Adding insult to injury, a local court this month failed to sentence the perpetrator, citing an inability to place a value on the thumb the man broke off the statue.
One would have expected a full-throated condemnation from Beijing of everyone involved in the affair, especially the American judicial system, for taking too lightly the destruction of a precious Chinese cultural relic.
China watchers know the usual response and might have been waiting for it. The act of vandalism and the failure to issue an appropriate punishment would have certainly “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”. For decades, China’s foreign ministry has wielded the feelings of the Chinese people as a cudgel to beat back against any perceived slights or hypocritical positions taken by foreign governments – the US and Japan in particular – and to take the moral high ground.
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The Philadelphia incident provoked an angry response from Wu Haiyun, director of the Shaanxi Cultural Heritage Promotion Centre, which loaned 10 of the ancient statues to the city’s Franklin Institute. Wu “strongly condemned” the museum for being “careless” with the statues, CCTV reported soon after the crime was discovered.
But the foreign ministry never pulled the feelings of the Chinese people into the matter.
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